On being misunderstood and underestimated
Deep damn thoughts for a Wednesday
There’s a strange risk in being private. On one hand, it can feel like we’re protecting ourselves and our creative work by keeping opportunities for unsolicited advice to a minimum. Which is totally fair.
But, also true, is that without knowing otherwise, people can (and often do) start filling in the blanks about us with their own default assumptions about the nature of creative work, about what we are or are not up to, what we know, and the scale at which we operate.
And to be sure, this is mostly my approach. I do not like to be mansplained or any other kind of splained. I don’t enjoy listening to inaccurate assumptions about my life or worldview. And, I really don’t enjoy feeling mischaracterized or misunderstood by people who claim to know me. I’m sure you don’t enjoy those things either.
But maybe also true is that you’ve been burned by oversharing, or the approach to self-promotion you’ve been taught to use doesn’t feel right, or maybe, like me, you grew up believing that the real work speaks for itself, erring on the side of keeping things on the quiet side until the work is done.
So, we keep our heads down, working quietly, and letting it be about the work. Yes. And that’s a good thing. But the other true thing at play here is that if we wait for people to ask if they want to know more, many don’t ask; they guess. And their guesses can land somewhere between condescending and incorrect.
Sometimes they assume we’re struggling, or doing nothing, or that we haven’t grown or evolved since we first met them years ago. Sometimes they offer help we didn’t ask for then demand to be emotionally managed when we turn the kind of help down that we never needed in the first place, especially when it’s in areas where we might have spent years developing expertise. And in those moments, it becomes clear that their perception isn’t shaped by our actual output or anything reflective of us at all, but that its shaped by our own lack of sharing.
This is especially thorny when things like depth and competence and excellence and discernment are all hard-won identity level things because then being seen otherwise feels antithetical to who we are or aim to be. And, when we’ve busted our asses to earn that, being treated like we aren’t playing at a high level or trying hard can feel like a invalidating dismissal of how we’ve chosen to spend our lives. Fuck.
There’s an inherent tension in this I want to stress: yes we should talk about the creative work less and do the actual work more. But also true is that there is a cost to keeping too quiet in that the gap between what’s true and what gets projected/assumed eventually becomes something we have to manage, even if we never invited the assumptions in the first place.
Privacy isn’t the problem. The problem is that discretion in public, creative life can read as lack or emptiness unless it is countered by visible output or narrative. Which is a whole-ass thing to do, and why I spend so much time thinking about ways in which we can put not just our creative work to work for us, but also the narrative about our creative work and about ourselves as creative people.
There is not a one-size-fits-all answer. The answer is deeply personal to each of us, connected to our individual boundaries and why they exist, and should be carefully aligned to each of our creative ambitions in ways that are thoughtful and meaningful to each of us, not necessarily just that which is defined as outward successful visibility.
