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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.
60 - The Unknown
The Johari Window Series — Part Four: The Crescendo
So in preparation for this episode, I texted a question to a few friends.
Now, who I asked mattered, because these friends are different ages, very different jobs, different cities, and they’ll have different relationships to the question being asked. Each friend I knew would have vastly different perspectives based on vastly different areas of work, life, personalities and worldviews.
The question was in regards to performing.
And I didn't define “performing” before I asked. I wanted to see what they brought to it without much prompting
The question was this: Do you think you're performing in any area of your life? Professionally, personally, creatively?
Here's what came back.
A photographer I know from Texas — shoots mostly events. This is how she makes most of her money. She’s really good at it, her clients love her. However, we all know photographing events is the kind of work that pays the bills but doesn't always feed the soul.
She said this: "I have to pretend I'm having a good time, when a lot of the time I'm bored and want to go home. I try my best to get good images but mostly I just want that money." And then she said the thing I think is important here:
"When I'm not performing, my brain moves faster. The creativity flows. I feel more like myself."
Another friend who has been performing her whole life — ballet on stage, music, being the good daughter you know, playing piano for her parents' friends when they came over, being the trophy kid (who can relate to that) — she told me she performs down to what shoes she put on. That she's always thinking about which version of herself to bring into whatever specific room she’s in. And then she said:
"Only I know that my REAL reason is to belong."
She also told me something that I think is important here.
She said she performs so well that when she tells people she struggles … with imposter syndrome, with self-doubt, with just getting herself to do the basic job … they actually don't believe her. Her coworkers are shocked. The people who've known her the longest can't square the accomplished person they see with the person on the inside who wakes up wondering if today is the day she gets found out.
"I think it's just an act," she said. "I think I'm good at putting on the mask."
She's been doing it so long she can't tell anymore.
And then a pastor friend from Iowa sent me a voice note in response to the same question. He preaches every Sunday to a smallish church congregation. He's fully aware of being watched. Aware of the cultural expectations that come with the job of church leader. But he said something different from everyone else.
"I don't feel fake. I don't feel like I'm trying to play a specific role."
But, he does say that he makes different jokes with his friends than what he makes from the pulpit. He knows the difference between the rooms. To him, both versions are him. Neither is the mask.
Not one person I texted though, said they don't perform. Not one.
The pastor was the only one who said he doesn't feel fake. And I've been thinking about that ever since.
My name is Patrick Fore and this is The Terrible Creative where we have honest conversations about creativity, identity, and finding your voice.
Today is Episode 60. We’re in the 60’s now. Bust out your bell bottoms and smoke them joints. This episode will be fun, I'm calling it "The Unknown."
This is the last episode of the Johari Window series. We've been in the Arena, the Blind Spot, the Facade.
Today we go to the fourth quadrant. The one nobody talks about.
If this is your first episode jump around — no particular order. Email's always open. Link's in the show notes.
Alright you groovy cats, let’s get into it.
For those of you who are new — go back and listen to The Glass House, The Tell, and The Facade first. They'll make this land better. But here's the short version.
The Johari Window is a model with four quadrants. What you know about yourself that others know too — the Arena. What others can see that you can't — the Blind Spot. What you know but keep hidden — the Facade. And what neither you nor anyone else has seen yet — the Unknown.
That's where we are today.
Two researchers built this model in the 1950s — guys named Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham. Of course his name is Harrington.
In the original model the Unknown was framed as a limitation. Territory nobody has access to. The blind leading the blind if you will.
I think that's the wrong way to look at it. Especially for us. Who am I to question a guy named Harrington though.
But for me, here's the distinction - as someone who does both commercial photography and personal work - photography and podcasts and everything else.
Commercial work has an objective you know. The image either meets the brief or it doesn't. My client isn't paying for my inner life — they're paying for the result. That's fine. That's the job.
But how I show up affects everything around the image. Whether the talent feels safe enough to be present. Whether there's enough trust in the room for something real to happen. The performance doesn't damage the image directly. It damages the conditions that make the best image possible.
Personal work is different. The podcast. The book. The thing you make when nobody's paying you to make a specific version of it.
In personal work you are the material. The work and the person behind it are supposed to be the same thing. And the Unknown — the version of yourself that neither you nor anyone else has fully seen yet — that's not just where the interesting work lives.
That's where this kind of work comes from.
Which is why the question I asked my friends this week matters.
Because if you're performing in your personal work — if the managed version is the one making the thing — then what's actually in the work isn't you.
It's the mask.
But before I get to far into this, I want to go back to the pastor from Iowa for a second.
Because after I recorded the opening of this episode — after I said he was the only one who told me he doesn't feel fake — he sent me a follow up.
He was at a friend's house. Having Long Island iced teas. And he said something that changed how I heard his first answer.
He said he works every day to keep pastor Kyle and real Kyle as close to reality as he can. That his wife helps — she calls him on it when she sees him drifting. That the hardest part of his job is all the non-reciprocal relationships. He cares about the people he pastors. They can't fully care back in the same way. The power dynamic won't allow it.
And then he said: "That's why so many pastors blow up their lives." The gap between the public persona and the private person grows until it becomes something they can't live up to. Until the distance between the two versions is so wide that something has to give.
He mentioned that he enjoys a drink. Won't bring it up on Sunday because several people in his congregation are in recovery. And I don’t think that's being duplicitous or hypocritical or whatever - I know Kyle, I know he has integrity. But it is the daily management of the gap.
Small. Concrete. Constant.
He wasn't describing integration. He was describing maintenance.
And I think that's actually more honest than what I thought he was saying the first time. He's not the person who has it figured out. He's the person who works every day not to lose the thread. Same as the rest of us. Just with a congregation watching.
And here’s the irony I keep sitting with, the thing I probably shouldn’t say out loud:
I perform in the context of a podcast—a medium where I could edit my way into being whoever I want and you’d never know the difference—and somehow, I end up more myself here than someone standing in a building specifically founded on the idea that humans should embrace their full humanity.
The original vision that Kyle is trying to live inside was radical because it was essentially a direct attack on the stage-actor version of humanity. In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ wasn't just giving a moral lecture; he was offering an exit from the theater. He was saying: Stop managing how you’re received. Stop the PR campaign for your own spirit. Show up as the full, complicated, unpolished thing you actually are. It was an invitation to be known in the Unknown.
But we’re human, and that kind of exposure is terrifying. So we took that wild, unscripted invitation to be seen, built an institution around it, and—almost without realizing it—gave it a dress code and a script. We turned the one place where you're supposed to be 'real' into the one place where the 'mask' has to be the most convincing
So I hired a stylist recently for a shoot.
I'd never actually met her. We'd chatted a few times on Instagram. I stumbled across her work and loved it — but honestly what got me was how she presented herself. Her vibe you know. The way she wasn't afraid to speak up about things she cared about, even when it probably cost her something. I love people like that. People who stand for something. People who let you see who they actually are.
I'd been wanting to hire her for a while. Tried to put together a personal project that ended up costing too much. So when this particular job came along it was just right for her. I didn't have any questions about hiring her.
And then she showed up on set.
And I got a slightly different version.
Not worse. Not less skilled. Just the more polished version, more professional.
The work was great. But the person I'd been following — the one with the opinions and the vibe and the willingness to cost herself something for what she believed — she wasn't quite there.
What I got was the professional version. The managed one. The version the transaction required.
And I found myself maybe a little sad about it.
Which is funny. Because she did exactly what you do when someone pays you. I was her client ater all. And when you have a client, you give them the version that earned the rate. (and she did) But you bring the competence and the execution and you leave the rest in the car.
And at the risk of sounding a bit hypocritical here, I do the same thing.
Every client I've ever had got a version of the professional Patrick.
But who I'd hired — who I thought I was hiring — was the person I'd been watching. The full version. The one that stands for something.
That's not her fault. That's what money does to a room.
But I keep thinking about it because I wonder how many people have hired me for the same reason — because they followed the podcast, or read the book, or found something I said that made them feel seen — and then got the professional version on set.
The managed one.
The one that left the complicated parts in the car.
I guess what I keep thinking about is that gap. Between the version of yourself that shows up in your most intimate spaces — at home, with the people who actually know you — and the version that shows up for the work.
And beyond that, what would it even look like to collapse that gap? To show up as the full version of yourself in professional spaces?
Would I get fired? Maybe. Probably not. But the fact that the question even occurs to me, tells you something about where the performance came from. What set of cultural and professional expectations created it. What I decided either consciously or unconsciously, somewhere along the way, had to stay in the car.
And there are spaces where I can be more myself you know. This podcast is one of them. But what if that Patrick showed up on set? What Kyle said is interesting to me — you show up as you in different spaces, but it's a more protected version of you. The room determines how much of yourself you bring.
There is something that kinda scares me though…
I don't know what I don't know.
I don't know what motivations and fears and insecurities and desires are running below the surface. The ones that shape the performance without me being aware they're doing it. And sometimes I'm afraid of what it would mean to fully show up as yourself — in any space, personally, professionally, creatively — because you might not like what you find.
There's the serial killer problem, right. Not to be too extreme about it, but it illustrates the spectrum we find ourselves in. The upstanding citizen by day who nobody would ever think would hurt a fly - then the serial killer at night who “transforms” into someone else - or maybe their true self? I don’t know. That's the extreme version of something we all carry — the gap between the public persona and what's underneath it.
Or alternatively, something less dark, the business executive who runs a multi-million dollar company and decompresses by playing Pokemon Go in the park. He hides that version because his C-suite friends wouldn't understand. Is that performance? Or is that just — discretion?
And that's the question I can't fully answer. What's the actual benefit of full authenticity? If professionally, relationally, culturally — it's better for people to maintain a certain performance — then what are we actually asking for when we talk about showing up as yourself?
I don't know.
I genuinely don't know.
And I think that's the most honest thing I can say at the end of four episodes about the Johari Window.
And yet.
Here's what my event photographer friend said. The one who's bored at events but wants the money. The one whose brain moves faster when she's not performing.
"Creatively I don't have to perform on test shoots or portrait shoots when they basically say 'we trust you.'"
We trust you.
Three words. And they change everything.
When someone says we trust you and means it (thats key, they have to mean it and you have to understand and BELIEVE that they mean it) — when the grade goes away for you, when the assessment stops, when nobody's deciding if you're good enough for the room — something opens up. The brain moves faster. The creativity flows. You feel more like yourself.
That's the Unknown becoming accessible.
Not through some mystical process. Not through years of therapy or shadow work or sitting with a guru on a mountain. Just through the removal of the condition that requires the performance in the first place.
Trust removes the audience. And when the audience disappears, the performed self has nothing to perform for. And what's left — the thing underneath the Arena and the Blind Spot and the Facade — that's the Unknown.
That's what the pastor from Iowa has that my friend who has to think about and choose what shoes match the mask of that particular room she’s walking into is still looking for. The pastor knows where to find it. He knows which rooms require the performance - his pastor persona and which ones don't. And in the ones that don't, he’s not thinking about his shoes or his jokes or his beverage of choice - he can just be fully him.
Most of us are still learning which rooms are which. The pastor included. For him though, there is more on the line for him, it has to be more clear. He has to be strategic about which version himself shows up and when.
And here's what I keep coming back to when I think about all of this — my friend and her carefully selected shoes, Kyle the Pastor’s Long Island iced teas, the stylist on set, my own I don't know.
Every one of those responses is about the same thing. The gap between the version that shows up and the version that's actually there. The managed self versus the unmanaged one. The performed versus the real.
And what I've found — not through any grand plan but through sixty episodes of showing up and saying the true thing — is that the Unknown self and the Unknown work are the same thing.
When the managed version steps aside, what comes through is both more you and more surprising than anything you could have planned.
Not always better. But always more honest. And honest is where you have to start.
This podcast started as a podcast for photographers. That was the Arena I could see — clean, legible, fits in a sentence, simple enough that my mother might even understand it.
What I couldn't predict — what lived entirely in the Unknown — was that it would connect with people who've never picked up a camera. Designers, writers, musicians, teachers, therapists, CEOs. People who emailed at midnight to say something landed. People who found it not because they were looking for photography advice but because they were looking for something that made them feel less crazy.
I didn't plan that. I couldn't have. Even if I'd set out to make the thing it is today, I don't think it would have become this. It was living completely in the Unknown.
The work revealed it. Sixty episodes of walking toward a flickering light without knowing what it was.
And that's the most honest thing I can say about the Unknown: you don't find it by looking for it. You find it by making something and paying attention to what it becomes.
Because when you stop performing for the audience you thought you had — when you just say the true thing — it turns out the true thing belongs to more people than you planned for.
That's not strategy. That's the Unknown doing what it does. Sometimes. Not always. But when it works, it works in a way that no managed version ever could.
So here's the question I’ve been thinking about. The one underneath all six responses that I received this week.
Why do we perform?
Not the surface answers, right, to fit in, to get the job, to not worry the parents, to belong in the room. Those are real reasons for the performance. But underneath all of them is something simpler.
We perform because we're not sure the unperformed version will be received. Or safe. Or appropriate for the room.
Sometimes that's fear. Sometimes that's wisdom. The Johari Window doesn't tell you which one. It just shows you the glass.
And so we edit it. We manage it. We put on the shoes that say the right things about which Lindsey we're bringing to this room today.
The Unknown is the unedited version. The one we haven't fully shown — sometimes because we haven't trusted it would be received. Sometimes because we haven't fully seen it ourselves yet.
And I want to be careful here. Because I don't think the Unknown is always good. The unperformed self isn't automatically the better self. It's just the less managed one. And less managed can mean more alive. Or it can mean more destructive. The Johari Window doesn't make that call. It's just glass. Neutral. Transparent. It shows you what's there.
What you do with what you see — that's on you.
And here's what I've found making this podcast:
Some of it won't be. Some rooms can't hold the unedited version. Some audiences aren't ready for it. Some clients are paying for the professional mask and that's what they need and that's fine.
But some will.
There are rooms where the unperformed self lands exactly right. Where the weird brain finds the people it's been looking for. Where the thing you thought was too inside or too personal or too niche turns out to be the most universal thing you've ever made.
Those rooms exist.
And there are rooms where it doesn't land. Where the unmanaged version costs you the relationship or the client or the standing you'd built. Where being more yourself is also being less careful, and less careful has consequences.
The window doesn't sort those rooms for you. It just shows you more of yourself so you can make a more honest choice about which version to bring.
That's all it does. That's all it was ever designed to do.
I’ve been thinking about where a lot of what I write about and speak about comes from. And I had a thought this past week, as I was walking Loki that I think, maybe, that I make most of this through a strange desire to speak to a past version of myself.
At so many points in my life I could have used a voice in my ear to read words on a page that made me feel less … alone, less crazy. For creatives like me, the ones who had to figure out their own paths, their own way of doing things, that path brings with it an incredible amount of intellectual and emotional loneliness.
Feeling like no one understands you, what you’re trying to make… or how you think and and move in the world - that feeling like you’re always the odd one in the room, no matter what room you’re in.
So that is where I create all of this from. I write in the direction of the 16 year old, 21 year old, 31 year old version of me - times when I felt most alone and misunderstood. Above teaching about how to make interesting things, I want to make the crazy ones feel seen, at least for a few moments. Because I truly believe that is more valuable than any piece of gear advice or business advice that I or anyone else can give you.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a photographer trying to make it in a competitive market, a graphic designer feeling trapped in a corporate job in some city you didn’t plan on living in or an executive assistant who at one point dreamed of writing screenplays but found themself just needing to get a job to survive - wherever you are, whatever you are doing - I see you.
The Unknown isn't a destination.
It's not something you arrive at after enough therapy or enough episodes or enough years of shadow work and shoe-awareness and trying to figure out which version to bring into the room.
It's a practice. A direction. A commitment to making something that couldn't have been planned because it comes from the part of you that the plan doesn't have access to.
My friend who performs down to her shoes — she said something in her follow up that think is worth highlighting:
"Being able to bring an authentic integrated self — I can do sometimes. But it takes a lot of work. To be grounded. To be calm. To get into that kind of space of being like: I can bring an authentic me that doesn't have to think she's being graded or assessed."
Sometimes. Not always. It takes work.
That's not a failure. That's the most honest description of the creative process I've ever heard from someone who wasn't trying to describe the creative process.
You don't get to live in the Unknown permanently. You get to visit. You get to make something while you're there and bring it back.
And the more you do that — the more you make things from that space, even briefly, even imperfectly, even when you're not sure the room can hold it — the better you get at finding the thread back.
The thread that the pastor works every day not to lose.
The thread that your friend who's been performing since ballet class is still looking for.
The thread that this podcast has been, for me, in the weeks when the photography work was quiet and the silence was loud and I needed something to walk toward.
The series ends here. Four episodes, four quadrants, four different ways of asking the same question.
Who are you — really — when nobody's grading you?
The Arena is the answer you give in public.
The Blind Spot is the answer other people give when you're not listening.
The Facade is the answer you keep to yourself.
Back in episode 57 - The Glass House - I said the model falls short. That the Arena requires two people. That you can't open the door alone and expect to be known.
I still believe that.
But I think Harrington was right about the window itself. It's neutral. It's just glass. It shows you the whole self — the parts you show, the parts others see, the parts nobody has seen yet. It doesn't tell you which parts are good and which are dangerous. It doesn't sort the rooms for you. It doesn't promise that transparency produces connection.
It just shows you what's there.
What you do with what you see — that's on you.
That's your job.
So.
Make it for them.
Not because it's safe. Not because you know how it lands. But because the version of you that makes the true thing — whatever that costs, wherever it goes — is the only version that has a chance of making something that matters.
Stay curious. Stay courageous. Stay terrible.