Ah, the creative dip.
Are you in it? I’m pretty sure I’m in it.
Sitting down to edit? Does. Not. Appeal.
Brainstorming my new book idea? Meh. Maybe later.
Even my old standby needle-felting isn’t really doing it for me.
My creative practice feels a lot like trudging through sand.
So what do we do when we’re in the dip? I think we have three choices:
White-knuckle our way through it (rarely works out how we hope)
Give up (no judgment — quitting is a valid option when something’s no longer working for you)
Embrace it as a natural and necessary part of the creative process
I’m going with door number three.
The dip is never fun. It conjures up all kinds of insecurities and old narratives. But it is indeed both natural and necessary.
Here’s a fun little story:
I studied German in Vienna, Austria for four months when I was 20. After the initial overwhelm of settling in, I noticed a strange pattern emerging — for a while, I’d feel very confident in my German skills. I could find the right words, converse with locals, and have a general sense of, “I’ve got this!”
A few weeks later, all that hard-won confidence would evaporate. I felt like I couldn’t understand anything. I’d beat myself up for not learning faster. Forget fluency — I’d never even get competent at this rate.
A few weeks later, my confidence would return, and the cycle would start again.
After this happened a few times, I realized that the dips — those times when I was sure I’d suck at German forever — were actually when I was learning the most. The peaks were my reward, when all those lessons gelled and turned into knowledge I could use.
Learning a language is like that. Writing a book is like that. Pretty much everything worth doing is like that.
TL;DR — The creative dip is not a sign of failure. It’s the world’s most counterintuitive proof that we’re growing.
What if we embraced it as such?
Yes! You + German = Me + Substack right now. Thanks, Robin.
I so feel you on how those moments of stickiness are when we are learning the most. It can feel so shitty but I find it’s only when I frame it as bad that it really sucks. When I just notice the feeling with less judgment and don’t make any meaning of it, I can ride the wave a little more fluidly 🌊