I’m Not Writing to Prove Myself Anymore

The Slippery Slope of Creative Validation

Lately I’ve been rethinking my relationship with creativity, ambition, and productivity.

I’m feeling rebellious. I’m tired of striving. And I caught myself thinking ‘I don’t have time for a trip because I have to write a book.’

That was when I realized I’ve been sliding down a slippery slope.

For a very long time, I’ve treated writing as a referendum on my worth.

Not consciously, perhaps. I never sat down and announced to myself that my value as a human being depended on book sales, newsletter growth, reviews, rankings, or productivity.

But emotionally? That was often the system running underneath everything.

If things were growing, I felt hopeful and capable and “on track.” If they weren’t, it was far too easy to feel as though I was somehow falling behind — not just professionally, but personally.

As though every slow month, every disappointing promotion, every quiet stretch online carried an unspoken verdict: Not enough yet.

I don’t think this is unique to writing, I think a great many creative people quietly turn their work into a performance review. And surely after thirty years of corporate performance reviews I didn’t need to start making up my own!

The Problem With Turning Creativity Into Proof

Creatives begin with love — love of stories, art, music, ideas, beauty, creation itself — and somewhere along the way we start measuring our right to continue, or worse, that we’ve arrived, by external proof.

· Proof that we are talented enough.

· Successful enough.

· Productive enough.

· Marketable enough.

· Disciplined enough.

Enough, enough, enough.

The exhausting thing about this arrangement is that there is no ‘there’ because unlike corporate deliverables, the goalposts keep moving.

· The industry changes.

· The algorithm shifts.

· Someone younger, faster, smarter, prettier, more prolific, or more strategic appears five minutes after your latest breakthrough.

And if your sense of self is tied to outcomes, peace becomes very difficult to access.

Lately, though, something has been changing for me. Not my ambition or my desire to improve. Not even my hope that my books will find more readers over time.

What’s changing is the emotional weight I’ve been attaching to the outcomes. I’ve started noticing that I no longer want to build a creative life fuelled entirely by pressure. Every writing session is not an audition for my own legitimacy.

And perhaps most importantly, I don’t want to rush through the experience of building a body of work simply to arrive at some imaginary future point where I’m finally allowed to feel successful.

Because the truth is that creativity becomes very brittle under constant evaluation.

· It narrows.

· It tightens.

· It loses its sense of play and curiosity and exploration.

Everything starts sounding faintly like fear.

When I Realized Productivity Was Replacing Living

One of the moments that really brought this home for me was that moment when I caught myself hesitating over an interesting trip because of writing. Or rather, because of the feeling that I should be writing.

That there was always another book to finish. Another project to push forward.

Another invisible deadline hovering somewhere just beyond the horizon.

And I realized, with some alarm, that I had quietly started treating life itself as an interruption to productivity. As though experiences had value only if they could eventually be converted into output.

But writing doesn’t work that way. Not really.

Stories are built out of lived experience as much as discipline. Curiosity matters. Rest matters. Conversation matters. Walking through unfamiliar places matters. Joy matters. Even apparent idleness matters.

A creative life cannot be nourished exclusively by production. At some point, if all you do is harvest, the field goes barren. And perhaps that’s part of the shift too.

I don’t want to build a life where every beautiful or interesting experience must justify itself by becoming content, productivity, or measurable progress.

I want room to experience a well-lived life alongside the work.

Oddly enough, I suspect that may make the work better in the long run, not worse.

Spaciousness, Mastery, and the Long Game

Recently, I found myself thinking about Isabel Allende, who releases a novel roughly every eighteen months. Not the ‘novel every three to six months’ that indie authors are expected to churn out.

One book. Carefully built. Spaciously written. No panic. No frantic content treadmill. Just the steady accumulation of meaningful work over decades.

That rhythm suddenly felt less like “not enough” and more like freedom.

And I realized something important: I’m no longer interested in writing to prove that I deserve to call myself a writer.

· I want to write because I love stories.

· Because I enjoy the process.

· Because I want to get better.

· Because creating meaningful work feels worthwhile in and of itself.

Strangely, letting go of some of the pressure hasn’t made me less ambitious. It’s made me calmer. More patient. More interested in mastery than validation.

I still care about success. Of course I do. I still want readers. I still want these books to thrive. But I’m trying to hold those outcomes more lightly now.

Instead of constantly asking:

Am I there yet?

I’m trying to ask:

Am I building something meaningful?

That feels like a healthier question. A more sustainable one.

And perhaps, in the long run, a more creative one too. I suspect I’m not the only creative person trying to learn this lesson.