Not you judging people instead of actually making things 👀

Week 1: Bare Minimum Artist's Way

Last week, we kicked off our 12-week journey through The Bare Minimum Artist’s Way — our ADHD-friendly version of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.

If you’re just landing here for the first time — welcome! We’re suspending the dogma rules about morning pages and artist dates and doing the bare minimum with The Artist’s Way, because we believe half-assing it is better than giving up on Week 3 .

Sound like you? Join us here on Substack and listen to our weekly companion episodes every Wednesday on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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You can’t embrace your creativity if you don’t think it’s safe to be a creative person.

Creativity requires us to reach down and feel around soft underbelly of our egos and accept the small creative flame flickering inside us.

It’s vulnerable as hell, and if we don’t feel safe, it’s nearly impossible to take creative action.

Yet every profoundly creative person you admire has at some point had to square up with the fear of judgment, constant comparison, and the weight of hypothetical opinions from strangers on the Internet.

Are you okay?

Google conducted a years-long study to find out what makes their internal teams creatively successful, and most of it boiled down to an idea they called psychological safety—the ability to take risks without fear of punishment or embarrassment.

But when it comes to our own creative endeavors, it’s worth asking ourselves if our own brains are a psychologically safe place to be.

If you’re constantly talking yourself out of things, tearing down your own work, or assuming failure before you even start, you’re creating an unsafe environment within your own mind.

That kind of internal hostility makes it impossible to get started, let alone grow in the creative capacity you long to experience.

And unfortunately, no 30-day content plan plan, Notion system, or pep-talk from your best friend will matter until you feel safe enough to simply create for yourself.

KFKD Radio

Self-doubt is universal and for sensitive creative types like us, it’s a huge problem. We all feel isolated in our creative insecurities, yet every artist, writer, and creator basically battles the same inner dialogue — you’re not good enough, this is too weird, you’re too much.

It’s easy to assume that successful creatives are more confident, but the truth is, they’ve simply found ways to navigate that inner dialogue and ask it to step aside for a moment.

A huge part of The Artist’s Way is learning to recognize your inner critic—not as an objective truth-teller, but as a predictable voice that shows up any time we’re about to step outside our comfort zone.

Anne Lamott calls this voice KFKD Radio, the station that constantly plays negative self-talk.

*radio DJ voice* Welcome back to KF&!D radio everyone, coming up next, we’ve a got a new piece of shit from the whiny know-it-all who doesn’t believe in herself. Can you believe she just keeps slinging this garbage?

(Change the station, babe!)

Julia Cameron expands on this, explaining that these voices—what she calls “censors”—hate anything that sounds like self-worth. Because to create, we have to believe that our ideas are worth taking seriously. But since most of us have spent years internalizing the opposite, it’s no wonder this step feels so hard.

It’s a film noir, but the bad guy is you

One of the most gut-punching concepts in this chapter is the shadow artist—someone who orbits creativity but never fully claims it. We admire artists, we surround ourselves with creative people, or work in creative-adjacent fields, yet we would never dare to step into our own artistic identity.

Many of us are shadow artists without realizing it. Maybe we:

• Love going to museums but never make anything

• Write marketing copy instead of personal essays

• Become writing coaches instead of authors

• Talk about million-dollar ideas with no intention of ever starting them

And we do all this because it feels safer. It allows us proximity to creativity without exposing ourselves to risk, failure, judgment, or—even worse!—success.

But Cameron makes it clear: the only way to move from being a shadow artist to simply being an artist is to claim it. Stop waiting for permission. Stop minimizing your creative desires. Make a decision that you already are that creative person, and start taking yourself seriously.

On a noble quest to find the audacity

"Very often, audacity—not talent—makes one person an artist and another a shadow artist." (p. 27 for those playing along at home!)

Woof! Let that sink in for a second. This phrase from the book has Internet creators written all over it.

How many times have you watched a Youtube video and thought — I could do that! … And yet you didn’t. You haven’t. It feels safer to judge than to try.

Look around—are the most famous artists, musicians, or writers always the most talented? Hell no. They’re just the ones who had the audacity to show up, hit post, and keep going.

Don’t ever wait until you feel “ready.” Move like an average-white-male-finance-bro and have some audacity.

Stop waiting. Stop hiding.

If you’re constantly talking yourself out of doing the thing you want to do because you’re imagining worst-case scenarios and failure, make a deal with yourself— If you’re going to imagine failure, you also have to imagine success.

What actually happens is usually somewhere in between, but you’ll never know for sure until you get off the sidelines and get in the game.

The shift from shadow artist to artist isn’t about talent. It’s about deciding.

You belong here.

Your ideas are worth pursuing.

You don’t need permission.

So, where are you hiding? Where are you waiting? And what would happen if you stopped?

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Read the companion article for Week 2:

Not you looking for approval from the wrong people 🫠