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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.
In poker, a tell is a leak—a physical twitch that gives away the hand you’re holding. It’s an unconscious signal that other players pick up on. And my friend Alycia has a 'tell' for my 'tells.'
When we’re in a group setting and I’m telling a story, she is paying attention. Alycia doesn’t just listen to the story I’m telling; she waits for the mxtoment my voice drops. She’s seemingly the only person I know who can hear the static in my head before I even open my mouth.
Alycia is a professional family photographer — which means she makes a living watching people try to perform perfect while their lives are just as chaotic and exhausting as the rest of ours. She's practiced at seeing the version of you that isn't for sale. She can take three screaming kids, an exhausted mom, and an annoyed dad and make them look like they belong in a Target ad.
She can also read me.
I’ll be mid-sentence. I’m telling a story I actually give a fuck about—something with meat on the bone you know, something worth the air it’s taking up. And then I’ll feel it.
It starts as a low-frequency static in the back of my skull—the sound of my internal sociometer dropping into the red. That's when I would see it, a glance shift toward a phone, someone clears their throat, and my 'lizard brain' decides the room is drifting. That I’m losing them.
And before anyone can actually reject the story, I reject it myself. I reach for the safety valve.
I’ll kill the narrative right there in the dirt. I’ll deploy that practiced, self-deprecating bark of a laugh and say: 'Anyway, I’m boring myself. I’ll shut up.'
The room laughs. We move on. The tension evaporates.
But Alycia will just look at me—dead-eyed, no smile—and she’ll say: 'Patrick. Shut the fuck up. Finish the damn story.
And I laugh, smile like I just got caught stealing a cookie from the forbidden jar. She saw the scaffolding of my insecurity. She saw me choosing a cheap exit over a real connection. She knew what I was doing before I had time to realize what I was doing.
Half the time, I don’t even remember how the story was supposed to end.
That’s the tell."
Well…
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 58. We've made it to 58. I really need to stop saying that — can one of you tell me if that's annoying.
Speaking of being annoying.
Today's episode is called 'The Tell.'
Today we’re talking about the gap between the armor and the person wearing it.
If this is your first episode welcome, jump around — no particular order. Email's always open. Link's in the show notes."
[Play the clip from Molly’s Game]
So if you didn’t recognize it, that was from the movie Molly’s Game. Great poker movie.
And in this scene, Harlan, played by Bill Camp, didn’t lose to the man across the table. He lost to his own expertise.
And as Molly Bloom tells us (played by Jessica Chastain) Harlan was listening for a signal that wasn’t being sent. He was solving a problem that wasn't in the room. When you are braced for a storm, you cannot feel the breeze. You are simply reacting to a ghost.
Expertise is a tool until it becomes a blindfold.
I was wearing that blindfold last week. The graphic designer. The guy with the empty doppio cup who wanted the credentials I didn't have language for. I walked into that room so braced for a storm—so ready to be rejected for my lack of 'labels'—that I might have missed the actual person in front of me.
I told you that the 'Arena' requires two people. That you can do your half with complete honesty and the door can still be locked from the other side.
I believe that. I still do.
How much of that was on him — and how much of it was me? The way I phrased things. The way I presented myself before the conversation even started. Maybe he picked up on something I wasn't even willing to admit to myself. Maybe my blind spot was creeping into the equation.
If you weren't with us last week — and if you weren't, go back, it'll make more sense — here's the short version. There's a psychological model from the 1950s called the Johari Window. Four quadrants. What you know about yourself that others know too — that's the Arena. What others can see that you can't — that's the Blind Spot. What you hide — the Facade. And what nobody knows yet, including you — the Unknown. The whole series we're doing right now is built around those four panes. Last week was the Arena. This week is the Blind Spot.
And the Blind Spot is where it gets uncomfortable. Because it's not about what the world gets wrong about you. It's about what the world is getting exactly right — and why you're the only one in the room who can't see it.
Now most blind spots are just gaps. Things you haven't figured out yet. Habits you haven't examined. Patterns you haven't named. Neutral stuff, mostly.
But some blind spots are active. They're not just things you can't see — they're things you're actively maintaining without knowing it. Systems you built to protect yourself that are now running in the background, making decisions on your behalf, shaping how you show up before you've even consciously decided how you want to show up.
That's the specific blind spot I'm interested in today.
So why does it happen? What's actually going on when the protective system takes over?
There's a name for it. I came across it while putting this episode together and felt sort of weird about being accurately described by someone who's never met me.
A guy named Steven Berglas spent years watching people — genuinely capable people — find new ways to undermine themselves before anyone else could.
He called it self-handicapping.
There's a name for what I just described. I came across it while putting this episode together and felt sort of weird about being accurately described by someone who's never met me.
A guy named Steven Berglas spent years at Harvard watching high-performing people — genuinely capable people — find new ways to undermine themselves before anyone else could.
He called it self-handicapping.
The idea: people deliberately create obstacles or excuses before a performance so that if they fail, the failure has an explanation that isn't their actual ability. And if they succeed, the win is even more impressive because they overcame something.
But it goes beyond that. For some of us the buffer works in both directions.
Because when you succeed despite the handicap, you can't fully own it either. The same system that protected you from failure also intercepts the win. It files it under luck. A fluke. The right place at the right time.
Definitely not evidence of actual ability — that would require updating the story you've been telling yourself, and the system wasn't built for that.
Why is that? Great question, I'd love to tell you.
Because ability is a baseline. If you admit you're skilled enough to win today, you're now a person expected to win tomorrow. You've raised the floor. By calling it luck, you keep the floor low. You give yourself permission to fail next time because hey — the luck just ran out.
So you can never fully lose. And you can never fully win. The armor is airtight.
And calling yourself terrible before anyone else can — building an entire creative identity around the word — that's the armor. You're not lying about your skill. You're installing a buffer between your real ability and the judgment of the room. If the work is bad, well, you said you were terrible. Nobody is surprised. Nobody can say anything you haven't already said to yourself in front of a mirror.
And if the work is good? You beat the odds. Which is its own kind of pleasure.
In my twenties I figured out that I could take the power away from someone insulting me by insulting myself first.
I'd say things like "you can't say anything to me that I probably haven't already said about myself." I'd agree with people when they called me an asshole or a terrible photographer — cough. I would just absorb the hit and watch them lose their footing. It was a genuinely useful tactical maneuver. If you agree with the attack, there's nothing left to attack.
And when it came time to name this thing — the podcast, the book, the whole project — I knew exactly what I wanted to do.
I wanted to call myself terrible and make better work than the people who would never call themselves that.
Because I have a deep, specific disdain for photographer elitism. The photographers who carry themselves like their photographic shirt doesn't stink because they shoot Broncolor or their wedding photos have been in Vogue. The ones whose identity is entirely wrapped up in the gear, the clients, the credentials. The ones who gatekeep the craft like it belongs to them.
Calling myself Terrible was a direct response to that. It was subversive. It was a rebrand of what competence actually looks like — not loud, not credentialed, not performing certainty. Just doing the work and staying honest about the process. And I actually believe that staying willing to call yourself terrible keeps you in a place of growth that comfort never finds. When you're not protecting a reputation, you can take risks. You can fail. You can learn.
So the name came from a real place. A defiant place.
I believed all of that. I still do.
And I was also — and this took me considerably longer to see — making sure nobody could ever fully back me into a corner where they had to take me seriously.
Those two things are both true. That's the part that's hard to hold.
There's a psychologist named Mark Leary who spent decades studying the relationship between self-esteem and social acceptance — not as abstract philosophy, but as a documented behavioral system. And his proposal was this: self-esteem isn't really about how we feel about ourselves internally. It's a gauge — he called it the sociometer — and what it does is monitor how accepted we are by the people around us in real time. When the gauge drops, when we sense social rejection or disinterest, the system fires off behaviors designed to protect our standing before the rejection can fully land.
The spider sense I get mid-story. The preemptive bail. The self deprecating conversational escape hatch.
That's the sociometer going into the red. It's a survival system doing exactly what it was built to do.
And here's the thing — the sociometer doesn't update itself automatically like a Tesla at 3am. It gets calibrated in specific environments, at specific points in your life, in response to specific threats that were real at the time. And then it keeps running that calibration long after you've left those rooms.
Now the armor doesn't look the same on everyone. And this matters.
For some of us it's what I just described. The self-deprecation. The preemptive joke. Making yourself small before anyone else can. Lead armor — heavy, dense, designed to absorb impact before it lands.
For others it looks like the opposite. The overclaiming. The confidence that's a few decibels too loud. The person in the room who needs you to know every campaign they've shot, every name they've dropped, every credential they've earned before the first cup of coffee is finished. Chrome armor — bright, reflective, designed to blind before anyone gets close enough to look.
We usually look at that person and see arrogance. But if you look closer you'll see it's just armor facing a different direction. They aren't trying to be better than you. They're trying to convince themselves they're enough for the room.
Both are running old software. Both are reacting to a threat that probably isn't in the building anymore. Just using different materials to build the same wall.
For me, the armor was hammered out early. In a three-bedroom midwestern house where I grew up.
I was the youngest of three boys, and my eldest brother Brian was a god-damned prodigy. An MIT grad, a PhD in math — a guy whose intellect had its own gravity. At the dinner table I didn't see a family meal. I saw a competition I was geographically and intellectually incapable of winning.
He was at one end of the table, literally building rockets. I was at the other, still trying to figure out how to stay inside the lines of a coloring book.
When the gap is that wide, you don't try to close it. You don't even try to run the race. You just opt out. I signed a surrender in crayon before I even knew what the word surrender meant. I gave up before I was old enough to know I was doing it.
I learned that if talent was a spotlight, standing in it was a liability. It felt like painting a target on my chest. So I chose camouflage instead. If I couldn't be the smartest person in the room, I would be the most invisible. I kept my wins small. I kept my abilities quiet and deniable.
The photography elitism, the corporate politics, the branding of myself as Terrible — those aren't the origin. They're just the new rooms that my old armor finally fits into.
It made sense then. The alarm was accurate.
In 2022 I left my corporate job. For the first time, really since before kindergarten, I was on my own. No institution to perform for. No competition to opt out of. Just time to sit with the patterns long enough to see them for what they were.
There's a thing that happens with creative people that doesn't get talked about honestly enough.
Everyone knows imposter syndrome right? — the fear that you're not as capable as people think, that you're faking it, that you'll be found out. It's real and most creative professionals have felt it.
But there's an inversion of it that's less discussed. The fear not that you're worse than people think — but that you're better.
That if you fully showed up, fully claimed the ability, fully stood behind the work without a joke to soften it — the expectation would become real. Permanent. And you'd have to keep meeting it.
The self-deprecation isn't just protecting you from being judged as bad. It's protecting you from being judged as good. Which comes with its own set of demands.
And for me? I am way more comfortable with critique than praise. You can probably hear that in if you listen to this podcast for any length of time. It’s not false modesty, it’s not modesty at all really. To me it literally feels like chewing on aluminum foul with a mouth full of cavities.
Critique though, I’m ready for it. I even crave it. I’ve had friends call me a masochist because one of the questions I like to ask people when they look at my work is, “Yeah, but what do you hate about it.”
I've thought about that a lot. I think it's because I built a system that could survive criticism. I trained for it all my life. Preempted it. Metabolized it before it could land. But I never built a system that could survive being seen as genuinely good.
How, fucked up is that?
So, praise makes me want to immediately correct the record. To say something that reintroduces doubt. To make sure nobody builds an expectation I might not meet.
Which means there's a part of me — and I'm not proud of this but I'm also not going to pretend it isn't there — that actually craves being seen as good, wants the acknowledgment, and then immediately feels ashamed about wanting it. So I deflect before anyone can offer it.
A fluke is a gift you get to keep. A baseline is a prison you have to maintain.
The photographer who always undersells the portfolio. The designer who says "oh it's just something I threw together" about something they spent three weeks on. The writer who buries the lead about their own credentials. The creative professional who works at a level their public presentation never quite admits to.
We need to be honest here, this isn’t humility like we to tell ourselves. This is, in fact, self-handicapping. There's a difference, a big difference, and the difference matters, because one is a virtue and one is a ceiling.
So back in 2021, before I went independent, I was working at a company here in San Diego. I had this performance review with my boss, a guy named Craig.
Craig was a straight shooter you know—the kind of guy who didn't waste time with the 'compliment sandwich.' And I sat down in his office with random framed prints leaning against the wall on the floor he told me, flat out, that I didn’t sell myself well to the team.
He said I wasn't talking about or promoting my accomplishments or wins to the department, and because of that, people who didn't work with me every day just... assumed I was taking up space i guess. That it was affecting my reputation and ability to lead.
And when he said it, I rolled my eyes so fucking hard I thought they’d get stuck.
I can still feel that eye roll you know. I can hear the specific tone of his voice. Because in that moment, I decided he just didn't 'get it.' - that he wanted me to play the bullshit game like everyone else that I was annoyed by. I dismissed the feedback as corporate bullshit. I told myself he was an idiot - that he/they/everyone should just see the work, see the results. That I shouldn’t have to broadcast anything. That was his job if anything.
But in retrospect, I think it was more me than them. What I thought was a refusal to play the corporate game was just an unwillingness to raise the stakes for myself.
That is a classic Top Right move.
Craig was handing me a map of my Blind Spot, but I was too busy protecting the armor to look at it.
The armor I’d built—the 'let the work speak for itself' posture—was a survival strategy I’d brought with me from those rooms in the rooms where I grew up.
Because in my experience, in a creative environment, or any environment really, the guy who talks the loudest is usually the guy who’s overcompensating for a lack of ability. I was terrified of being that guy. I didn't want to be the noise; I wanted to be the signal.
But here’s the physics of that armor: A lead shield doesn't just block the radiation; it blocks the light. By making sure I never looked like a self-promoter, I accidentally made myself invisible. Craig, my boss, wasn't attacking my character; he was describing my silhouette. He was shining a bright light at my own Blind Spot, but I didn't have courage to look.
My sociometer detected a threat to the 'Terrible' identity I’d spent decades perfecting. So it did what it was designed to do: It dismissed the source. It locked the door. And it kept me exactly where I was."
In my early twenties, I had a friend in Michigan named Katie. At twenty-one, I was a walking noise machine of cynical arrogance. But in those late-night study sessions in bookstores and coffee shops, something happened I’ve spent my life trying to replicate.
I don't remember what we said. I just remember the absence of the filter. For the first time, I wasn't performing. I was just there. And she was just looking at me. She didn't see the armor; she saw the person wearing it.
That kind of seeing is rare because the armor we build to keep the 'Brians' and 'Craigs' out also keeps the 'Katies' out. It’s hard for someone to love you when you’re standing behind a wall of your own making.
Okay so I've been talking about myself for a while now. More than I'm usually comfortable with.
But I don't think this is just my story. I think you might have a version of the dinner table. A version of the coloring book. A version of the armor you built in a specific room for a specific threat and then carried into every room after that.
I think you have a Katie too. Someone who saw past the thing you were running. And I think you know how rare that felt.
And I think you've probably been wearing the armor in rooms that don't require it. Longer than you'd like to admit.
But here's what I'm not saying.
I'm not saying the armor was wrong. The self-deprecation, the Terrible brand, the survival mechanisms you built — they were adaptive. They worked. They had a function. The environment required them and you responded rationally.
What I'm saying is this: the armor was built for a specific set of rooms. And most of us are still wearing it in rooms it wasn't designed for.
The sociometer is still running the old calibration. The self-handicapping is still installing buffers against threats that aren't in this building anymore. The Blind Spot is keeping in place a version of yourself that made sense then and costs something now.
The goal isn't to take the armor off. The subversive middle finger to elitism? Keep it. The ability to absorb a hit without flinching? Keep that too.
The goal is to know you're wearing it.
For me that looks like this: I know I bail on the story before anyone can lose interest. I know I deflect the praise before it can land. I know I installed a buffer between my real ability and the world's judgment.
Your version looks different. But you know what it is. You've known for a while.
And today, in whatever room you're in, with whatever work you're sitting on — put the buffer down for ten minutes and see if you catch fire.
Most of the time you won't.
Mostly you'll just finish the sentence. And Alycia will nod. And the story will have been worth telling.
You have a tell.
Your clients see it. The people who've worked alongside you see it. The people who love you have probably tried to name it in ways you found reasons to dismiss.
It's not a flaw. It's a broadcast. Something true about you that you haven't fully acknowledged yet, leaking out through the work, the communication style, the patterns that repeat across every job and relationship and creative project you've ever had.
Here's what I want you to walk away with.
The armor made sense when you built it. I'm not asking you to apologize for it. But most of us are still wearing it in rooms that don't require it. Still running a calibration that was accurate twenty years ago in a house or a job or a community that no longer exists. Still blocking the connection we actually want because the system that keeps people out doesn't know how to be selective.
That's the Blind Spot. Not a flaw. Not a character failure. Just old software running on new hardware.
The move isn't to take the armor off. The move is to notice you're wearing it. To ask, in this specific room, with this specific person, doing this specific work — is the alarm accurate? Or is it running on an old map?
You don't have to answer that right now. Just asking the question is enough.
The question isn't whether the tell is there.
The question is whether you're choosing it or it's choosing you.
Stay curious. Stay courageous. Stay terrible.