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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.
So, here’s a random fact about me. I have a borderline religious obsession with diners.
Not the California "locally sourced, artisanal avocado toast" bistros with the Edison bulbs and the $16 mimosas. No. I’m talking about the real ones. The secular cathedrals of the American roadside. The shrines to bad coffee and decent pie. The temples to maple syrup, patty melts and whipped cream topped nostalgia.
I’m talking about places where the air is 40% oxygen and 60% aerosolized bacon fat. Where the waitress has a name tag that says "Barb" and a look in her eye that suggests she has survived three divorces and a small-scale uprising, and she does not have the emotional bandwidth for your questions about the gluten-free options.
And … There’s just something comforting about that diner menu. The laminated kind with the metal tips on the corners.
The weight of it you know? The thickness. The way it resists your hand.
It doesn’t apologize. Doesn’t need to.
It doesn’t update. It doesn’t have an identity crisis.
It just is. It serves a specific purpose.
Burgers. Fries. Pie. Coffee taste like shitty diner coffee, but weirdly warms the soul
The menu tells you exactly what a burger costs. It doesn't ask you for a 'ballpark figure' or a 'creative brief' first.
The rules are printed in 12-point Cooper Black. The identity is sealed under three millimeters of plastic. There is no 'discovery call.' There is no 'circling back.' The decision is made.
[3-second pause. Fade in the clinking of a single spoon against a ceramic mug.]
But this isn’t about a diner.
It’s about the kind of life that never seals.
The kind where the menu rewrites itself every day, sometimes, several times a day
Where the silence after the work sounds exactly like failure.
Where no one tells you if the stool is occupied because you’re good… or because you’re cheap.
This episode is about that life.
The freedom. The cliff. And the floor you build when the ground won’t show up.
⸻
My name is Patrick Fore, and this is The Terrible Photographer podcast where we have honest conversations about creativity, identity, and discovering your voice.
Today is Episode 54 friends, we’ve made it to 54. I'm calling it "The Cliff."
Today, we’re talking about three things: Clarity. Parameters. And what freedom actually costs.
To do that, we’re going on a bit of a journey. We’re going back to a dead pharmacy in the middle of a Midwestern cornfield to look for a ghost. Then, we’re coming back to the present—to a late-night design project for a client that doesn't exist.
We’re going to look at why 'freedom' is a terrible place to build a foundation, and how to create what I call 'Small Floors'—those tiny, finished objects that keep your nervous system from redlining when the career path gets blurry.
And despite the name, this isn't just a show for photographers.
Whether you're a writer staring at a cursor that's been blinking at you for forty minutes, a designer who's been circling the same project for three weeks, or someone trying to build a career out of a skill nobody has a clean job description for — you're welcome here.
The episodes are in no particular order. Jump around. And as always, if something lands, if something doesn't, if you want to argue with me — email is in the show notes. I read everything.
[Slow your delivery here. Drop register. Storytelling voice now. Let the transition breathe.]
The reason I’m thinking about diner menus isn’t because I’m hungry, even though a BLT always sounds good. It’s because I’m looking for a weight to hold down the papers of my life you know? Something solid, something that I can grab on to consistently. Something that isn’t always vague or unstable or unclear.
But as I've mentioned before, I grew up in Freeport, Illinois.
If you drive about two hours west of Chicago—past the point where the skyline disappears and the corn starts to feel personal—you’ll hit Freeport, Illinois.
It’s a town built on a foundation of limestone and a kind of midwestern stubbornness that borders on the pathological. Freeport isn’t "quaint." It’s heavy. It’s a place that was designed in an era when the primary architectural philosophy was "Do Not Budge." Everything is dark-red brick and calcified stone—buildings that look like they were meant to survive a nuclear winter or, at the very least, a century of brutal, soul-shredding humidity.
When I was twenty, I hated that gravity. I resented the way nothing ever seemed to move, the way the town felt stuck in a permanent, industrial exhale. I wanted the light. I wanted the airy. I wanted a life that didn't feel like it was made of wet cement.
[Beat]
But lately?
Lately, my professional life has become a collection of digital vapors. It’s a series of "maybe" emails and PDFs that live in the cloud and contracts that evaporate before the ink—which isn't even real ink—can dry.
And suddenly, that Freeport gravity doesn’t feel like a trap anymore. It feels like an anchor. In a world where my entire career is built on the shifting sands of "synergy" and "deliverables," I find myself looking back at that limestone-heavy horizon the way a guy in a sinking rowboat looks at a boulder.
I’m not looking for "pretty." I’m looking for something that won’t move when the wind blows.
I’m looking for Emmert Drugs on Stephenson Street, downtown.
[Optional: Very faint, period-accurate radio static or a distant, muffled big-band tune—just a fragment.]
Emmert’s was a secular cathedral. It was this strange, beautiful hybrid of mid-century medicine and malt shakes—a place where you could get a polio vaccine in one aisle and a slice of cherry pie in the next. By the late 70s, the rest of the world had moved on to the sterile, fluorescent efficiency of the big-box era.
But Freeport has always treated time more like a suggestion than a rule.
Emmert’s was a glitch in the matrix. It survived well into the mid-90s. As a kid in the late 80s, I didn't know I was sitting in a museum of a dying culture; I just knew that when I sat on one of those chrome stools, the world had edges.The air smelled like antiseptic and grilled onions. The light was filtered through those tall, dusty pharmacy windows. And there it was—that menu.
[Sound: The heavy 'thwack' of a laminated card hitting a counter.]
It was laminated so thickly you could probably use it as a weapon. It was the only thing in my life that felt absolutely, 100% finished. The prices were fixed. The options were final. The "Double Exposure Burger" (which didn't exist yet, but bear with me) wasn't a "pivot" or a "brand strategy." It was just lunch.
I didn't just leap off the cliff the minute I left Freeport. For almost years, I did the opposite. I existed within the walls. I lived comfortably in a fortress of "predictability."
I traded the limestone of Illinois for the production design floors of Dubuque. Then it was a production house in L.A., followed by a stint as a graphic designer in Oklahoma City—which, looking back, was a beautiful fever dream of red dirt and mid-century strip malls that I still haven't quite processed.
[Beat]
I kept climbing. I was a Production Designer in Houston. A Senior Designer in Washington State. Eventually, I landed in San Diego as a Creative Director, then a Lead Photographer.
And for two decades, my life was laminated. I had the bi-weekly paycheck—that holy drumbeat of American stability. I had the 401k match. I had a dental plan. I had "Performance Reviews" where people told me exactly how many gold stars I had earned.
I was living in the cage, but the cage was comfortable. It had climate control and a coffee station that never went empty. I wasn't on a cliff; I was in a bunker.
[Music stops abruptly. A low, cold wind-sound or a hollow digital hum.]
But then, I decided I wanted "freedom." I wanted the autonomy of my own lens. I wanted to build wealth for myself and not a Board of Directors I’d never met.
So I walked out of the bunker. I left the 401k and the regular paychecks and the "Lead Photographer" title at the door. I stepped out into the open sky, expecting to fly.
And that’s when I realized that when you trade the "walls" of a company for the "freedom" of yourself... you don't just get the view. At least not for a while.
You get the drop.
But here’s the thing about the cliff: After you’ve been walking along the edge for long enough, your nervous system stops caring about the view. It just wants to know where the fucking ground is.
[Music shifts: A transition from the "warmth" of the memory to the "cool, digital hum" of the present.]
Which is how I found myself in San Diego, in December of 2025, staring at a blank Illustrator document at 2:00 in the morning...
I need to say, 2025 wasn't a tragedy. It was just... a lot of friction. The feeling of trying to run through deep snow.
And photography is a business of vapors. You get an email on Monday that feels like a promise, and by Thursday it has evaporated into the atmosphere, leaving nothing behind but a lingering sense of rejection. There is no manager with this job. No one comes by your desk to pat you on the shoulder and say, "Patrick, your use of negative space today was exemplary. Here is a gold star and a sense of security." There aren’t promotions, or employee of the months. No one to protect you from unreasonable demands from upper management or refill the coffee station when it gets low.
There is just you and the work. And then the silence. And then you, sitting in that silence, wondering if the silence is disappointed in you.
[3-second beat of dead air.]
I don't know why I opened Illustrator that particular night. It was late. I was caffeinated. And suddenly, I wasn't a photographer anymore — I was a man possessed by the ghost of a dead pharmacy.
I started sketching. A logo became a brand. A brand became a menu. By 2:38 AM, I was lost in the weeds of kerning a font for a diner that did not exist, in a town I hadn't lived in since I wore cargo pants and listened to Blink-182.
I called it Emmert's, and it was so much fun to design a fake brand identity for them. I probably had the most fun with the menu — laughing at myself at 4am when I thought names like the "Tri-X Club" sandwich and a "Kodachrome" milkshake were clever as hell. I was building a world where the coffee was bottomless and the rules were written in stone. Or at least, in 12-point Helvetica.
I did this for a solid 24 hours. Went down a full neurodivergent hyperfocus work rabbit hole. The kind where I forget to eat and I put off urinating till it’s a def-com 5 emergency. Just me at my desk, empty diet coke cans and coffee mugs, designing spec work for a client who was essentially a figment of my own imagination.
My shoulders, which usually reside somewhere near my earlobes, had dropped. My heart, which usually beats with the frantic energy of a trapped moth, had slowed to a dignified stroll.
It was the feeling of a task with edges you know. A framework that I control, a task I could sketch out and perform while drinking pour-over coffee while listening to the Interstellar soundtrack on repeat.
Because here’s the secret they don't tell you in the brochures: Commercial photography is a high-stakes endurance test disguised as a creative pursuit.
It is ninety percent friction.
It’s hauling eighty pounds of black plastic Pelican cases through an airport at four in the morning. It’s sitting in a glass-walled conference room in San Diego, nodding at a marketing director who uses the word "synergy" with the kind of straight-faced sincerity usually reserved for a eulogy.
You spend weeks pitching ideas that cost more than your mortgage—concepts you’ve bled over, obsessing over the light and the narrative—knowing full well they’ll likely be strangled by a committee of people who are more afraid of "risk" than they are interested in "art."
And the kicker? The part that really grinds the gears of your soul?
[Beat]
You haven’t even pressed the shutter yet.
You’ve spent forty hours performing "success" and "competence" and "vision," and you haven't even made a single image. You are just standing on the edge of the cliff, leaning out over the abyss, praying the client’s budget doesn’t blink before you do.
That is the life of the "free" creative. There is no manager to tell you you're doing a good job. No HR department to refill the coffee. There is just you, the silence of a "no," and the weight of the gear you still have to pack up at the end of the day.
But that late December week, in the glow of my monitor, I had a floor. I had a brief I'd written for myself. I had a deadline I'd invented to satisfy a boss who was also me. I had a clear sense of what done looked like.
And when that fake menu was finished, the lamination — at least in my mind — was finally, mercifully, dry.
I spent a long time thinking about those weeks. It wasn't a rehearsal for a career change. It was a search for a parameter. It was an attempt to solve what business coaches and psychologists call The Freelancer’s Paradox. The paradox says that the more "freedom" you have, the more structure you need to keep from drifting into space. We fight for the open sky, but once you’re out here, you realize the boundaries haven't disappeared. They’ve just changed. They aren't the walls of a cage designed to keep you in—they're the edges of a cliff with nothing to keep you from the drop.
This is where the paradox meets the hard science: The Demand-Control Model. [REPETITION REMOVED: Kept the primary explanation here, deleted it from the Resolution later.]
Research shows that the highest levels of exhaustion don’t come from hard work—they come from the combination of High Demand and Low Control. That’s the Freelancer’s Paradox. You care deeply—High Demand. But you have zero control over when the phone rings or if the check clears—Low Control. High stakes. Zero feedback. A life lived on a cliff.
The people who last are the ones who learned how to build "Small Floors." They create tiny, artificial environments where they have 100% control. A "laminated menu" for their own sanity.
Patrick: And no one tells you this when you’re considering the leap. It’s always portrayed as a highlight reel. On LinkedIn or TikTok, the perception is all about the autonomy.
But you have to realize: the people posting the "six-figure months" have a vested interest in the mirage. In this world, Success Performance is the ultimate marketing tool. We’re all terrified that if we show the friction, the clients will stop calling. So, the "freedom" we broadcast is actually just a lead magnet. It’s a survival tactic disguised as a lifestyle.
What that marketing doesn't mention is that while you're busy performing "freedom," your biology is staging a protest. Your brain evolved to need clear signals. You hunted, and you ate. The feedback was physical.
Freelancing gives you none of that. Every project ends in a silence that might mean a re-hire, or might mean you’re being replaced. Your nervous system cannot tell the difference.
That is why we build Small Floors. We need finished objects that tell the nervous system: this one is done. For me, one of those objects is this show. Fifty-four episodes. No matter what else is uncertain, I know this episode will exist where it didn't before. That's a floor. Small, but real.
Patrick: You are not weak for needing a floor. You are not losing what you’ve built just because some nights you open Illustrator and design a diner from memory because your nervous system needs one thing it can finish.
The freedom you chose is real. The cost of it is also real. You don't have to resolve the tension. You just have to stop pretending the cost isn't there.
The lunch counter at Emmert's Drug Store is gone. The chrome stools are gone.
But somewhere on my hard drive, there’s a version of it that never closed. Where the menu is laminated and the feedback is immediate. Where the drip coffee is four dollars with unlimited refills.
It was never about the diner. It was about needing one day where "done" meant "done."
Patrick: So here's what I'll leave you with. If you've been grinding through something with no clear feedback—you're allowed to put it down for a night and make something small and completable. A sketch. A recipe. Anything with edges.
The cliff will still be there in the morning. But your nervous system needs the occasional proof that "done" is a real place you can get to.
There's a show called Alone. They drop people in the wilderness to see who survives. And everyone they select already knows how to fish and build a fire. But they still quit. Most of them.
And it's not because they forgot how to fish.
I've been thinking about that a lot lately. About what actually ends you when the skills were never the problem. That's the next episode.
Until next week… stay curious. Stay courageous. And yeah—stay terrible.