The Process You Keep Private: What the Gap Between Your Described and Actual Creative Practice Is Costing You
The authentic creative process is usually stranger, more fragmented, and more shaped by health than the version you think you should have ... and that's okay!
There is a consistent and mostly unacknowledged performance that happens whenever artists talk about their creative process, and the performance costs more than most people realize.
I’ve spent more than twenty years asking artists, directly and in detail, how they actually work. What I’ve found is that almost everyone has two answers to this question. The first is the one they give: coherent, sequenced, legible, generally respectable. The second is the one that is true: more fragmented, more specific, stranger in its details, more visibly shaped by health, history, and the particular constraints of their actual lives. The gap between these two versions is sometimes small. More often it is considerable. And maintaining it, the continuous low-level effort of presenting the performed version while actually living in the authentic creative process, has costs that compound over time.
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What the Performed Process Usually Sounds Like
The performed creative process tends to have certain features regardless of the artist describing it. It tends to have dedicated time, usually described in hours and usually in the morning. It tends to have a space, a studio or a desk or somewhere that signals “this is where the work happens.” It tends to have a method, some version of how the artist moves from initial idea through drafting or sketching or composing toward a finished thing. It tends to sound like the product of intention and discipline working together, with occasional acknowledgment of difficulty that is framed as challenge rather than obstacle.
What tends to be absent from the performed process is the body. The pain, the fatigue, the medication schedule, the particular window of usable energy that determines when work is actually possible. What tends to be absent is the mess: the abandoned starts, the work that happens in wrong places at wrong times, the rituals that would sound superstitious if described plainly, the circling and apparent avoidance that precedes a lot of creative engagement. What tends to be absent is the health context that shapes everything else.
When the Ritual Falters, It Is Reporting Something Real
When a creative ritual stops working, the standard interpretation is that something has gone wrong with the artist’s discipline or commitment. This interpretation is almost always inaccurate.
Creative rituals break down when the body or mind can no longer sustain the conditions the ritual assumed. Executive dysfunction, which accompanies depression, ADHD, chronic stress, and a range of other health experiences, impairs working memory, sequencing, and initiation in ways that directly affect whether an established ritual can be entered at all. The familiar sequence that cued creative engagement last month may require more cognitive and physiological resources than are currently available. The breakdown is a signal that the conditions of making have shifted, and the process needs to update accordingly.
The artists who navigate this most successfully tend to treat ritual breakdown as diagnostic rather than catastrophic: a moment to ask what the ritual was providing and whether another form of that provision is available. A ritual that required quiet and an uninterrupted morning may be providing felt safety and transition from ordinary life into creative presence. When that exact form becomes unavailable, the underlying need can sometimes be met differently, and the rigid ritual can become something more flexible and responsive.
What the Authentic Creative Process Usually Contains
When I ask artists to describe their authentic creative process, specifically and candidly, what emerges tends to be considerably richer and stranger than the performed account. The authentic creative process usually contains a specific time window that is a product of what the body has available, which may be early morning or late night or a narrow window in the afternoon when a particular medication has worn off or a particular pain has temporarily receded. It usually contains rituals of some kind, specific and often private behaviors that lower the threshold into creative work.
It usually contains significant amounts of what looks like avoidance but is more accurately described as circling: time spent in apparent non-work that is actually a form of preparation, processing, or necessary delay. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s model of creative cognition identifies incubation as a distinct and necessary stage of the creative process, the phase of apparent non-work in which the problem or material is being processed below the level of conscious attention. The artist who is circling may be in incubation. Attempting to skip it, to force the starting before the circling has completed, tends to produce different work, usually thinner work, work that is missing something the circling was providing. The performed process skips straight from inspiration to execution, leaving out the phase that the authentic creative process knows is required.
The mess that the performed version omits is often where the real work is happening. In trauma-informed frameworks, external chaos frequently mirrors internal fragmentation: the piles, the overflow, the things left undone are a body and mind operating under specific conditions. The gap between knowing what to do and being able to do it maps where the overwhelm has pooled, where the energy is going, what the body has decided it cannot currently spare.
What Sensitivity Produces That the Performed Version Conceals
Artists who navigate heightened emotional sensitivity, whether from anxiety, depression, trauma histories, or neurodivergent experience, often carry a particular kind of shame around that sensitivity in the context of creative process. The performed process presents a creative person who is in control of their emotional register, who enters and exits creative engagement on schedule. The authentic creative process for many of these artists involves a more complex relationship with internal states, one where the emotional terrain actively shapes what is approachable, what is inaccessible, and what quality of attention is possible in a given moment.
Psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema’s research on repetitive self-focused thinking draws a crucial distinction here: rumination, which cycles through the same material repeatedly without generating new insight or resolution, produces the experience of having examined something thoroughly while actually reinforcing the existing frame. Genuine self-reflection, by contrast, generates new angles and new understanding. For artists with heightened sensitivity, the difference matters. The creative self-awareness that tracks emotional states, registers shifts in capacity, and notices what the work is doing can be a resource of considerable depth. When it loops, cycling through the same identified difficulty without moving, it tends to reinforce the problem rather than illuminate it. Understanding which mode you are in changes what kind of attention is actually useful.
This sensitivity, when operating as genuine reflection rather than rumination, is frequently the source of the work’s specificity and depth. The heightened awareness of internal states that can make the creative threshold harder to cross is the same awareness that produces work of emotional complexity. The sensitivity and the creative capacity are the same thing, operating in different registers.
When the Hidden Element Is AI
One of the more specific versions of the performed-versus-actual process gap playing out right now involves AI. Many creatives have incorporated AI into their actual process in ways that fit nowhere in the public version of their practice, because the public conversation has sorted people into positions that don’t accommodate nuance, ambivalence, or a practice that is still working out what it is doing and why.
The artist who uses AI in small, specific, private ways, for generating a first draft to respond to, for talking through a problem, for moving past a block, and who has told no one because they aren’t sure how to explain the actual role it plays, is carrying a specific version of the performed-versus-actual gap. Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, whose self-determination theory research is foundational to how we understand motivation, describe introjected regulation as the process by which external pressure becomes internalized as an internal command. The external pressure to have a clear position on AI has been absorbed by many creatives as an internal demand. The anxiety of holding an unresolved or complicated practice becomes functionally indistinguishable from the anxiety of being wrong. The result is secrecy, and secrecy has its own costs: the energy of maintenance, the loneliness of a practice that cannot be described, the absence of creative conversation that might actually help.
The authentic creative process, whatever it contains, deserves the same candid examination that any other element of making deserves. A practice that includes AI in some form is still a practice. What it is doing and why it is doing it are questions the process can answer, if you let it.
What the Actual Process Is Protecting
Here is the thing that often gets missed in the conversation about the gap between performed and actual process: the authentic creative process, with all its fragments and strange rituals and embarrassing conditions, is frequently protecting something real and valuable.
Psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s concept of the true self offers a framework for understanding why. Winnicott argued that the true self, the part of a person capable of spontaneous, undefended engagement with experience, only emerges in conditions of felt safety. When those conditions are absent or unreliable, the false self develops as a protective layer, presenting a socially acceptable version while the true self remains hidden. Applied to creative process, the hidden practice, the strange ritual, the fragment in the notes app, the circling that precedes real engagement, is often where the true self is doing its work. The performed process is the false self’s version, coherent and respectable and available for description. The authentic creative process is the one that can actually make something.
The fragment that lives in a notes app is protecting the work that happened when the only available window was a small one. The ritual that sounds superstitious is protecting the felt safety that creative vulnerability requires. And in some cases, the gap itself is protecting creative joy: the private experience of making that has not yet been handed over to external evaluation. Artist Jackie Liu describes painting joy as a daily act of resistance, a refusal to collapse into the narrative that pain is the only legitimate subject matter of art made from inside illness or difficulty. There is something of this in the actual creative process too: the joy of the strange ritual, the satisfaction of the fragment that became a thing, the particular quality of work that could only have been made by this process, with this body, under these conditions.
The work gets made somehow. By this process, in these conditions, with these fragments and rituals and fits and starts. That is the whole point.
Understanding the gap between your described creative process and your authentic creative process is one of the most direct routes into understanding your creative health. The two are never separate conversations. If you want to examine your actual process with someone who has spent a long time learning to see what these patterns reveal, Creative Health Mapping and Navigation sessions are built for exactly that work.
Writing from Others:
With gratitude for the words you share Erik Thor, Anne Zelenka, nishita, Coffee With Keats and Lois Mac
