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The Terrible Creative is a storytelling podcast for photographers, designers, and creative professionals working through the parts of the creative process no gear review or business course ever covers.
Each episode is 30 to 40 minutes. Solo. Story-driven. Built around mental health, artistic identity, and what honest work costs in a career rewarding performance over truth.
This is not a photography podcast about cameras, presets, or client strategy. This is a podcast about the inner experience of being a creative professional, made for the mid-career photographer or designer who has mastered the technical side but lost the thread.
Hosted by Patrick Fore, commercial photographer, author, and former lead photographer and brand designer for Taylor Guitars. His work has appeared globally for clients like Nike, Petco, and Verizon. He built this show because none of the podcasts he found addressed the real problem.
If you are a photographer or creative professional who feels competent on the outside and quietly lost on the inside, you are a Terrible Creative. This is your podcast.
The glow from the mac monitor didn't just light up the room. It felt like it was ionizing the air.
I was sixteen, sitting in an art room at Freeport High School, hunched over a Mac G5 that was literally chugging under the weight of the file I'd built. Pushing Photoshop to its absolute breaking point. Dozens of layers deep, cosmic textures so dense the processor would hang for a few seconds every time I moved a brush.
I wasn’t just a junior in AP Art anymore, I was a god-damned cartographer of the infinite, mapping out territories that hadn't been discovered yet, using pixels as my only weapon against the quiet, suffocating boredom of my ordinary midwestern high school.
While the other kids were editing their skateboard videos or recreating logos from their favorite football team, I was lost in the physics of a black hole that I'd built from scratch.
I wasn't just making a space image. I was reaching into the guts of the universe and pulling out handfuls of neon stardust, hot and heavy and completely lawless.
I had magenta nebulas bleeding into deep, impossible violets. A bruised, electric sky that felt like it was still being born. Stars layered upon stars, math and light colliding in a sensory riot that wasn't design, it was transcription. I was tapping into a frequency I wasn't supposed to have access to yet.
Like a broadcast from the edge of a black hole, transmitted through my school's T1 internet connection in a cornfield town where in 40 minutes I would find myself sitting in another class, probably a math class where my brain would inevitably be back in my stars, the cosmos.
The work that I was creating, It was a beautifully fucked up kind of wonder.
The depth was so thick it felt like it had its own gravity. I was building worlds where the light didn't just fall. It ached. And I was high on it.
My teacher, a guy named Mr. Castro, a marine vet who looked like he could drop out of the ceiling to snap your neck like a chicken bone or paint you a masterpiece, appeared at my shoulder with two women I didn't recognize. Faculty from the Art Institute of Chicago. I didn't even hear them come in.
“And this is Patrick” Mr. Castro said in a proud tone. “Patrick does a bunch of stuff with these computers that I didn’t even know was possible.”
They sat down. Leaned in.
“What motivated you to make this?” One of them said.
“Honestyly, I don’t know” I said, giving a very unsatisfying teenage answer. “I guess when I started to play around with Photoshop, I started to make something that looked like space, so I just went in that direction.”
The other asked where the light came from, how I created that specific texture in the light.
“Oh, yeah, that, well I figured out that if you add monochromatic grain in a color gradient it creates that effect.” I said. Now feeling a little insecure about it. Feeling like they were just blowing smoke up my ass.
As Mr. Castro and one of the women were talking behind me. The other woman, who must have been in admissions, leaned in, and said quietly: you're the kind of student we're looking for. Please apply. We have a new digital media program that I think you’ll be great for.
Later that month, Mr. Castro had that piece printed as part of the AP Art show at the local art museum. It was displayed next to pastel drawings of flower fields and ceramic bowls. It looked like a monolith that had fallen from a higher civilization.
And then that particular light went out.
And I walked away.
I walked away from it all….
Well, my name is Patrick Fore and this is The Terrible Creative. Honest conversations about creativity, identity, and finding your voice. Today is Episode 62. I'm calling it Subterranean. On Obsession, Part II.
Last episode we talked about what obsession looks like from the outside. Michele Zousmer and Andrew Hertel, two photographers in a room in San Diego who reminded me what it looks like when someone has found their thing and followed it past the point of reason.
This episode is about where that thing actually comes from. How it grows. What buries it. And how you learn to read it when it's still underground.
Today we’re talking about three things.
The Recurring Anger, The Involuntary Attention, and The Dismissed Unserious.
If this is your first episode, feel free to jump around. They're in no particular order. Email is always open. Link's in the show notes.
So, there's a concept from 19th century psychology called monomania. A singular, consuming fixation. One idea. One pursuit. One question that wouldn't let go. Or, we might call it, Obsession.
At the time, doctors considered it a disorder. Something to be treated. Something to be managed back toward normalcy.
But while the doctors were busy writing prescriptions, the artists were busy taking notes. They looked at these same 'monomaniacs' and didn't see an illness—they saw an engine. They realized these people weren't broken; they were just the only ones in the room who could see what was being built.≈ ≈
John Updike drew a line about this, specifically about J.D. Salinger. He said: "The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all."
I want to spend a few minutes unpacking the difference between Artists and entertainers.
Because I think it comes down to what Updike basically said. Obsession is the dividing line.
The entertainer is a host; they make you feel comfortable. But the artist is an archeologist of their own haunting. They don't just 'find a style'—they find a site where something is buried, and they start digging. They don't stop when it gets dark, and they don't stop when their hands start to bleed. They stop when they reach the bottom, even if that takes a lifetime.
To see what it looks like when a human being chooses the labor of the obsession over the safety of the paycheck, you have to look at two specific lives: American filmmaker and film producer David Lynch and composer, singer, songwriter Jon Batiste.
Lynch has been chasing the same ghost for thirty years. Batiste was born into a house where the ghosts were already, literally family.
So... David Lynch grew up in Boise, Idaho. And the way he describes it, his childhood was essentially a postcard. Sunshine, green grass, mowed lawns. He was an actual Eagle Scout from small-town America, and he says that without a hint of irony. That was his world. That was the surface.
But then, there was this one night.
This is Lynch to tell you the story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfkXiX2qVKs
I think we like to believe that obsession is a choice. We think we pick a subject, go deep, and 'decide' to care. But Lynch is proof of the opposite. Obsession isn't a choice; it's a directive. It’s a moment that happens to you, and then spends the rest of your life demanding an answer. And while Lynch found his on a sidewalk in Boise, for others... the obsession is already in the room before they even arrive.
Which brings us to Job Batiste.
Jon Batiste was born into it.
His father, Michael played bass on the Chitlin' Circuit in the sixties and seventies, performing with Jackie Wilson and Isaac Hayes. His father co-founded the Batiste Brothers Band. Seven brothers. R&B, soul, funk, New Orleans music. The family dynasty spans twenty-five musicians across multiple generations of New Orleans history.
He was playing drums with the family band at eight years old. At eleven, his mother suggested he switch to piano. He took classical lessons every Saturday for seven years. And in between lessons, he taught himself to play by transcribing video game music. Street Fighter. Final Fantasy. Sonic the Hedgehog.
He was the heir to a New Orleans musical dynasty, a legacy that stretched back generations. But even with all that history in his blood, he still had to find his own identity.
He went to Juilliard—the most prestigious conservatory in the world. The absolute peak of the 'serious' music framework. And when he showed up with a toy - a Melodica, it was a problem…
Here’s Jon Batiste.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_rdGE4Pt0E
They thought he was out of his mind.
Think about that. One of the most gifted musicians of our generation was sent to a psychiatrist because he wouldn't stop playing a plastic toy in the cafeteria. To the people inside the 'Juilliard' framework, Jon’s obsession looked like instability. But to Jon? The melodica was the bridge. It was how he was learning to communicate 'all that stuff inside' to the rest of the world.
That’s the hallmark of monomania. To the outside world, the obsessive looks broken. They look like they’re 'on something.' But really, they’re just refusing to compromise their art for your comfort.
Jon had pneumonia, he was fainting in subways, he was falling out of bunk beds—a literal 'symphony of mishaps'—and he still wouldn't put the toy down.
Because when the obsessions is that strong and that clear, you don't care if the room thinks you're crazy, you keep going, not because you want to, because you need to. Like you’re in a flow of something powerful, something dangerous, something that people in your life may not understand.
And with Batiste, he didn't rebel from his family roots. He ran them through everything. New Orleans tradition, through classical training, through Juilliard, through jazz, through whatever he could get his hands on.
The obsession wasn't any one of those things.
It was the question underneath all of them: how do you use music to connect people to each other?
In 2011 his band recorded an entire album on New York City subway trains. Not for the concept. Not for the content. Because he'd been sitting with one question: how do you reach people who aren't already in the room?
He carries that melodica into subway stations and plays for strangers. Not for the clip or out of ego, but because the music has to exist in the room with people.
The dynasty gave him the roots. The obsession grew in a direction nobody in the family had gone before.
David Lynch's obsession found him on a sidewalk when he was a child. Batiste's obsession was planted in him before he was born and grew in a direction nobody expected.
Neither of them woke up one morning and decided what to care about.
Which is what I think most people get wrong about obsession. We treat it like a choice. Like something you select from a list of available interests and then commit to. Pick a niche. Go deep. Obsess.
But that's not what obsession actually is. Obsession isn't chosen. It surfaces.
The roots grow underground for years. Fed by accumulated experience, unresolved questions, training and learning, and an anger that keeps returning or a curiosity that won't quiet down. What eventually breaks through is just the visible tip of something that's been building far longer than you knew.
You don't stumble into your obsession. You stumble into the first moment you're willing to follow it.
"I’ve been thinking about my own root system. I’ll give you some Patrick Fore 'lore' here—a part of my life I don’t talk about much anymore.
At one point, I thought I was meant to be a pastor.
It started in 10th grade. I followed a girl to a youth group on the edge of town, mostly because her older brother had a car and I wanted to be near her. It was a small, hormonal decision that set me on a path I wouldn't return from for two decades.
The church came with a Framework. A rigid, high-contrast definition of what was acceptable. My creativity was suddenly 'valued,' but only within the parameters of that room. At seventeen, when the world is big and terrifying, a framework doesn't feel like a cage—it feels like a life raft. It made me feel like I belonged.
That’s where my art shifted. It moved from that lawless, arbitrary cosmic nebulas into something 'practical.' Something that could be leveraged to communicate a message.
By nineteen, I was an intern. I met a guy named Josh—the communications director. He was a graphic designer who rode motorcycles and went rock climbing. He was the first person I ever wanted to replicate. He taught me information architecture, sure, but he also taught me how to ride. I found myself mirroring his style—clean, but edgy. I was building a foundation for a career, but I was also building a life on someone else's blueprints.
Then came the 'factory floor.' My first real job was at a newspaper in Dubuque, Iowa. I was a Junior Designer, and I learned the dirty, boring, blue-collar side of the craft. I spent my days swapping out pricing data for used car dealers and graining out bumper photos for half-page ads.
Then came the marketing teams. Bigger roles. Higher stakes. Design first, then photography—same workflow, different tools. But I was always working for a Brand. I was always operating inside a framework of what the work needed to be to satisfy someone else’s bottom line.
And then the Algorithm arrived. Trends. Formats. Velocity.
Three different frameworks. Three different sets of rules. And somewhere underneath all of them, a sixteen-year-old in Freeport, Illinois, was still sitting in front of a screen, waiting for permission to finish a universe he’d started.
As I was outlining this episode, I had a disturbing thought. I’ve been sitting with it for weeks. Up until just a few years ago, the last artistic act I performed purely for myself—without a framework, without a 'client,' without a rulebook—was that cosmic project in 2001.
How fucking nuts is that?
For twenty years, I de-calibrated my own soul. I brainwashed myself into believing that creativity was only valuable if it was practical, sharable, or monetizable. I wasn’t an artist; I was a high-level compliance officer.
And that pisses me off.
It feels like an artistic injustice—the theft of a signal that was silenced because I wanted to belong to the framework more than I wanted to belong to the work.
Last week, I talked about the bathroom shoot. That image of a topless model sitting on a toliet reading a fashion magazine in a San Diego apartment. That was the first time since I was sixteen that I made something just because I thought it should exist. That wouldn’t be approved by a pastor, a boss, my parents or even the Instagram terms of service.
And In that moment, it felt like I’d been driving in second gear for a lifetime and suddenly downshifted into fourth. It felt like relearning how to walk after 20 years being confined to a wheelchair.
I can trace everything I’ve made lately—the photos, the podcasts, the words—back to one singular engine. And it’s not photography. It’s not 'content.'
It’s resentment.
It is a deep, burning anger against other people's definitions of what the work is allowed to be. Who I was allowed to be.
And when I sat on that library floor in downtown San Diego, pulling musty photography books off the shelves, I wasn't looking for 'inspiration.' I was looking for permission. I was looking for a way back to that seat in the Freeport High art room—a seat that was interrupted by hormones, a rigid faith system, and a corporate framework that kept my spirit restrained to what was safe and 'approved.'
Those grainy, black-and-white images of women, half-naked smoking cigarettes on russian iron balconies who didn't ask for permission? They were a broadcast from a different world. They taught me that maybe I shouldn't ask, either.
The obsession was already there. The frameworks just buried it.
And the work I’m doing now? It’s just the signal slowly breaking the surface that had been buried for decades.
So, how do you find yours?
The honest answer: You aren't looking for something new. It’s your job to start to unearth parts of yourself that have been buried for maybe years and years.
But I know what some of you are thinking. You’re sitting there thinking, 'Patrick, I don’t have a bloodied woman in the dark. I don't have a melodica. I’m just... fine. There’s nothing under the surface.'
I used to say that, too. I spent twenty years saying that while I made things for other people and convinced myself this is who I am and all I’m capable of and worse … the value of my creativity is determined by other people, people who would pay me or an algorithm that would make my work deemed worthy of being seen on an app.
Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung had a warning for people like us. He said: 'Until you make the unconscious, conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.'
If you feel 'empty' or 'fine,' it’s usually not a lack of obsession, it’s actually suppression.
You haven't done the honest, scary work of looking at your own Shadow—the parts of you that don’t fit into the framework that you, or your boss, or your clients, or your family, or your friends or a culture approves of.
You might feel like you’re empty, but really, you’ve just paved over your true self and then built a life on it. And if you want to know what’s under the pavement, in the dirt, in the messy but interesting parts of who you are, you have to look for the cracks.
Here are three signals worth paying attention to:
1. The Recurring Anger. Not general frustration with the world. I’m talking about that specific, localized heat that returns to the same subject over and over. The thing that makes you think, 'This shouldn't be this way.' For David Lynch, it was the rot under the lawn. For Batiste, it was the distance between the music and the people. Your anger isn't a distraction; it’s a compass. It’s the heat coming off the thing you were born to protect.
2. The Involuntary Attention. What does your eye go to before your brain has time to censor it? What are you reading about at 2:00 AM when you should be sleeping? What do you notice in a room before you notice anything else? This is the Magnetic Pull. It’s your subterranean self trying to tell you where the gold is buried. If you find yourself obsessing over the way light hits a specific kind of brick, or the way a sentence is structured, don't dismiss it. That involuntary pull is the root system trying to find water.
3. The Dismissed Unserious. This is the one that usually hides in the Shadow. These are the things you’ve been told aren't 'serious' enough for a 'professional' career. The Church said it wasn't acceptable. The Brand said it wasn't marketable. The Algorithm said it wasn't trending. For me, it was 'Cosmic Art.' It was this podcast. It was the image of the model in the bathroom.
We bury our truest obsessions because we’re embarrassed by them. We’re afraid they make us look weird or unprofessional. But the things you’ve been told are 'unserious' are almost always the only things worth following.
Here is the part I haven’t figured out yet.
I can trace my signal back to that screen in Freeport. I can feel the resentment. I can see the 'gold' in the bathroom shoot. But knowing where the signal comes from and being able to follow it are two different things.
After twenty years of working inside other people's frameworks, trying to listen to my own signal, trying to find life underneath my own pavement is like trying to walk again after your legs have been confined to a wheelchair for decades. The muscles are atrophied. The balance is off.
The Terrible Creative, the book, this podcast—they aren't the destination. They are just the first signs of life that breaks through the soil. They are the rough, jagged edges of something that’s been underground so long it’s forgotten its own shape.
Look, It's been over 20 years and I’m still figuring out what that sixteen-year-old was actually trying to make. And sometimes it takes that long, especially when you build a career, a life on that pavement that was safe, and clear and approved.
"I want to leave you with one more story.
It was 2008. I was living in Los Angeles, sitting in a dark theater on a Saturday afternoon, watching Pixar’s Wall-E.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-d8BJ2iljc
There’s a sequence early in the film where the little robot has just watched his love, Eve, be taken up into a spaceship. In this heroic, desperate, love-fueled act, he latches onto the outside of the hull as it tears through the atmosphere.
And then... they hit the void.
What follows is a sequence of pure, silent wonder. You see Wall-E reaching out his small, mechanical hand to touch the rings of Saturn—space dust twirling and dancing in his wake. Then the camera moves in close on his eyes—those binocular lenses—and you see the reflection of the nebula.
Magenta. Deep purple. A red so thick it felt like a pulse.
The shot pulls wide, and you see the ship suspended in a universe that is vast, honest, and textured.
And I felt a slingshot in my chest.
Have you ever had a moment that violently yanks you back to a version of yourself you haven’t thought about in a decade?
Sitting there in that theater, I wasn't in LA anymore. I was sixteen. I was back in the art room at Freeport High. The uncanny resemblance between what I was seeing on that giant screen and the file I’d built on that G5 monitor was profound. It was a jump-scare to my soul.
That was what I was making before I knew what I was making.
I don't know what that means exactly. I just know it means something. It was an echo of a signal that existed before the Framework arrived. It was a moment of pure, subterranean remembering—an obsession that had been buried so deep it took a Pixar movie to remind me it was still breathing.
But when the lights came up, I didn't change my life. Not then. I snapped back into the reality of the framework. I went back to the church, back to the brand, back to being dormant. I wasn't courageous enough yet to peer into the cracks of the pavement and see the universe I’d buried.
But the signal never stopped broadcasting.
It’s been trying to surface ever since—in every bathroom shoot, in every grainy photograph, in every honest word I’ve managed to put into this microphone.
You probably have one, too. Not mine. Yours.
The question isn't how to find it. The question is whether you're willing to get quiet enough to hear it. And then, whether you're brave enough to follow that signal before you even understand where it’s going.
Because as John Updike said: 'The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.'
Go be an adventurer.
Stay curious. Stay courageous. Stay terrible."