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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.
59 - The Facade
So I’ll be hoenst - I don’t have a fancy intro for you today. Usually I try to write something creative, then use fancy sound effects to place you in the scene - but, I’m not sure that's right for this week.
I must say, this was a hard episode to write, probably one of the more difficult. And I think it’s because, as you’ll hear, sometimes I lose my sense of gravity with these words I speak every week. I get in my head you know? I start to question is up really up? Is the thing that I’m feeling the thing that everyone else is feeling? Are the thoughts floating through my brain, even remotely relatable with anyone else or am I simply just a guy, sitting at a computer, speaking into a microphone for his own self indulgence. I don’t know.
You know, sometimes I feel like this whole Terrible Creative, Terrible Photographer thing; the book, the podcast, everything that goes along with it. I think if you were to press me on why I'm doing it, I can't give you a clean answer.
I would probably tell you something like "well, this is the thing I was looking for for a long time." And while that's true…seriously… if I was being totally honest, it's something I have to do. But it's hard to articulate why.
Because here's the thing. I don't know where it's going. I don't have a huge strategic plan. It feels more like walking through a dark, dense forest at night. And very far away I see a dim, flickering light. And I have this feeling from a deep part of me that I need to be walking towards that flickering light. So I do.
But sometimes the light disappears. Sometimes it's so dark I can't see the trail. Then other times the light seems to get brighter for a while and the trail opens up onto a clearing. But then it goes back to the dense dark forest where I can only see a foot in front of my face.
And I think the thing that scares me most about it; this whole trek into the void — is not that I'll get lost or killed in the process. It's that if I stop walking, if I sit down to take a break — which people in my life have told me I can do, that I'll never want to get back up again. That I'll stay there, under the protection of a tree, comfortable and safe.
And that terrifies me.
So I keep doing this, week after week, hoping that dim flickering light is something worth pursuing.
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 59. I'm calling it "The Facade." Todays episode can really be reduced down to three words, “Bleeding. Silence. Walking.”
Practically speaking, we’re talking about how every professional creative, but really though, anyone who considers themselves an artist, has a gap between what they show and what's actually going on while they're making it. The finished frame versus the two hours of failed shots before it. The confident voice versus the person who almost didn't hit record. Today we talk about what's actually going on behind the mic.
If this is your first episode, jump around — no particular order. Email's always open. Link's in the show notes.
I almost didn't make this episode.
Not this specific episode — this whole series really. I was sitting at my desk earlier this week and I had a moment where I thought, nobody wants to hear about the Johari Window for three more weeks. This is too obscure. Too second year psychology major. Too much of me trying to sound interesting, or intellectual or evolved about what is ultimately just a psychology diagram from 1955.
I went back and forth about it for about a week. Thought about pivoting to something else. It’s funny, when I first started this podcast about a year ago I was worried about running out of ideas, I mean how much can one person say about being a photographer you know? Now, I have more ideas than time.
I wrote this idea down for a series down about 6 months ago, it was during a idea brain dump and I wanted to unpack why we make the decisions we do? How we are all creations from the stories we tell ourselves. How we present ourselves to the world, our clients, our friendships - those micro decisions we all make on a daily basis, where do those things come from?
When I started to research I stumbled across the Johari Window and I was immediately interested because it provided a psychological framework for something that I had been wondering about for years.
But as we will talk about, with things like this, I worry about the relevance to my listeners you know? I worry because my weird brain finds it interesting that others wont. So I almost abandoned this idea.
But the more I thought about it, I really tried to step outside of those thoughts and view them through the Johari Window itself. And what I was feeling this past week — the fear that it wasn't connecting, that nobody cared, that I should hide behind something safer — that's the Facade. Hiding the thing you're actually trying to say because you're not sure anyone wants to hear it.
So here we are.
For those of you who are new, or jumping in — and if you are, go back and listen to The Glass House and The Tell first, they'll make this land better — here's the short, 10,000ft version of what we're doing.
The Johari Window is a psychological model from the 1950s. Two researchers — guys named Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham. Of course his name is Harrington.
The idea is simple. Four quadrants that map what you know about yourself against what others know about you. Picture a window with 4 equal parts separated by a pane.
The Arena (top left) this is what you know and others know. The public version of you. The work you show, the voice you use, the face you put on. That is what we talked about in The Glass House (episode 57)
The Blind Spot (top right): this is what others can see about you (good, bad, neutral) that you can't. That was last episode, The Tell (episode 58)
The Facade: (Bottom left) this is what you know about yourself that you keep hidden form others. That's today, (episode 59)
The Unknown: what nobody knows yet — including you, thats a fun one. That's coming up for episode 60.
Now, I need to explain why am I doing this as a series about creativity specifically. Because, really, I think the Johari Window describes something every creative professional is living inside and nobody is naming directly.
Because look, we are in a specific kind of business where the product and the person are the same thing. A plumber, for example, can have a bad day and still fix the pipe. The pipe is either fixed or it isn’t.
An accountant can be confused about his identity and still calculate numbers to balance the book. Either the numbers work, or they don’t.
But when you're a photographer, a designer, a filmmaker, a writer, a podcaster — what you make comes from who you are. The work and the self are entangled in a way that most professions don't have to deal with.
Which means the Facade isn't just a personal thing. It's a professional strategy. And it has specific, concrete costs.
Most people think the Facade is about hiding failure. The 400 blurry shots behind the one perfect frame. The client email that made you cry before you wrote the professional response. The time you were fired for a job because the project lead didn’t like your work.
And yes. That's part of it.
But the version I want to talk about today is harder to name and I think more common than we want to admit.
It's not hiding the mess. It's hiding the need underneath the work.
So, I want to jump back in time for a moment, late May last year when I wrote Episode 7 of this podcast called ‘My Friend Hue”. This episode is all about color theory, kinda nerdy I will admit. And if you go back and listen, you can tell straight away that it’s an outlier. It doesn’t really fit you know?
And it was about that point I had run out of my initial list of episode ideas. I had no plan. I just kinda nerded out on something I was genuinely interested in and hit publish. I remember thinking it was either going to be the dumbest thing I'd ever put out or genuinely interesting to someone.
I think that about most episodes, honestly. I write most episodes based on what I find interesting or (if I can be so presumptuous) what I think we all (or at least certain people) need to hear.
And episode 7, My Friend Hue, that was the week I stopped having a clear map, but kept going anyway. Fifty-two more episodes counting today, venturing into increasingly darker and denser forest, towards a flickering light I can't always see.
So, The Facade I was running — and still run, some weeks, most weeks actually — is presenting as someone who knows where they're going. The confident host voice. The person who has thought carefully about what they're making and why it matters.
Some weeks that's true.
Other weeks I close my Macbook and walk away from the microphone because I'm not feeling it. Getting through the script feels like trudging through wet cement. I know the listener will hear the difference so I just don't record.
I've noticed something about which episodes are easiest to make.
The conceptual ones. The philosophical ones. Where I'm the guide and the framework is the subject and I'm mostly just the voice explaining the map, where i’m detached from the content you know. Those episodes flow. I sit down, I write, I record, I'm done.
The episodes like this one — like The Glass House, like The Tell — where the map is me, where I'm not explaining the territory but actually standing in it, using myself as ‘exhibit a’ — those are different. Getting through the script feels like a self-inflicted colonoscopy.
Which tells you something about where the Facade lives.
The easy episodes are the ones where I'm most hidden. The hard ones are the ones where I'm not. And the degree of difficulty is almost exactly proportional to how much of the actual person (me) is in the room versus how much of the host. The detached voice in your ears.≈
And some weeks I sit down and I'm genuinely not sure if what I'm about to say is worth saying. Whether this episode, this series, this whole thing is connecting with anyone in a real way or if I'm just making noise into a void that's too polite to tell me to stop.
Those are the weeks the Facade is working hardest.
Because, every week, I hit record anyway. I use the host voice. I present as someone who has thought carefully about this, who knows why it matters, who has a point worth making. And I do think it matters — I wouldn't be here if I didn't — but the certainty I present and the certainty I feel are not always the same thing.
That's the gap. The distance between the version of this you hear and the version of this I'm actually living while I make it.
You know, when it comes to photography, I have the receipts. The image works or it doesn't. The client is happy or they're not. Years of data points. I know what good looks like in that space. I have control. I’ve built mechanisms that make sure I am meeting expectations. There is quality control. Simple things you know? I can look at how much money I’m making or if my images measure up to top people in the industry. I can look at my feedback from clients. I know what worked and what didn’t based on clear data.
But this space — the podcast, the book — is different. The feedback loop for a podcast, especially the kind of episode where you say something that costs something to say, isn't a clean signal. It's mostly silence. The best episodes are usually the quietest on the back end. If you're lucky you might get one DM or email that lets you know something you said landed.
And that was the thing I wasn't prepared for. The thing I find hardest. Not the writing, not the recording — the not knowing. Whether what you're doing is landing or disappearing.
And PLEASE hear me. This isn't some reverse psychological ploy to get more atta boys and positive affirmation. I really am just trying to tell you how weird the silence is — coming from a position where every creative role I've ever had had some sort of letter grade attached to it.
So without that validation reference point, I perform certainty I don't fully have. I present as someone walking a known trail.
That's the Facade. It’s not lying exactly. Just not showing you the dark parts of the forest.
Here's what I've noticed about the silence after certain episodes.
The Glass House. The Tell. Insider/Outsider. Angry. Episodes where I said something that were the most open and transparent. The silence after those is different from the silence after a more philosophical episode. It's not empty silence. It's the kind that makes you question if you miscalculated. If you went too far. If you lost sight of your listeners. If you confused your own self-therapy with content.
And my brain — which does not handle ambiguous data well — starts generating its own conclusions. They sound like: nobody cares what you think. You're not a writer, you're a photographer who got ideas above his station. This whole thing is self-indulgent and the silence is the market speaking.
I know that voice. I know it's not reliable. I run it through the filter and I keep walking.
But the Facade is pretending that voice isn't there.
There's something in psychology called the Zeigarnik Effect. Bluma Zeigarnik was a Lithuanian psychologist who noticed in the 1920s that waiters in a restaurant could remember every detail of an open order — table number, specific dishes, modifications — but the moment the order was delivered and closed, it vanished from memory almost immediately.
The brain, it turns out, holds open loops with significantly more intensity than closed ones. Unfinished things grip us. Unresolved things keep firing. The feedback loop that never closes keeps running in the background, consuming processing power, generating anxiety.
The podcast is an open loop. It doesn't close. There's no delivered order, no satisfied client, no image that either works or doesn't. It just keeps going, week after week, into the silence.
And the Facade is performing like that's fine. Like you have a system for it. Like the ambiguity doesn't cost anything.
It costs something.
So here is what almost quitting and coming back looks like for me. And this is going to get a little weird.
Like I said, I had a different episode idea in mind. It's a good idea — I'll do it eventually — but I was at a point where I was questioning my questioning. Have you ever had a time like that? Where you lose all confidence in your own taste? Where your instincts just go quiet and you're left holding an opinion you can't verify?
So I did what I do now when I start to question things — I talked it through with AI. I still feel weird saying that. And I don't know if that's a great thing to admit.
But here's why: I don't have a smart friend I can call when I start to spiral on a creative decision. Or if I do, they don't have the context. It would take twenty minutes just to get them caught up on what this podcast is, what the Johari series is, what I'm trying to do and why I almost abandoned it. By the time we got there I'd have already talked myself out of the spiral on my own.
So I have an AI that has all the context. And I talk to it like it's a collaborator. Sometimes it tells me things I already know but need to hear from something outside my own head. Sometimes it tells me to shut the fuck up and just do it. Sometimes it tells me my instincts are right and I should reconsider.
Where else am I going to get that?
That's part of the creative loneliness of this thing that I wasn't prepared for either. The silence from the audience is one kind of lonely. But the silence of having no one to call when you're mid-forest and can't see the trail — that's a different kind.
But in the end I have to trust myself. That the thing I set out to do is the right thing. Even knowing that if it doesn't land, the failure is one I'll probably never fully be able to see. Two weeks from now, a month from now, a year from now — this will just be another episode, another point on an analytics graph.
That's fucking weird for really personal, creative work that feels so vulnerable, where you bleed onto the keyboard just to show people that you're a real god damned human.
So for creative professionals like us, the Facade around process is one of the most damaging things we build.
Not because the polished work is dishonest. The polished frame is real. The good image actually is good. But when we present only the product and hide the process — the uncertainty, the weeks of silence, the almost-abandoned projects, the episodes we made because we needed to hear them — we create a standard that our peers and our audiences feel they have to live up to.
We accidentally build a culture of impostors.
Every photographer who has ever looked at another photographer's behind the scenes content and felt inadequate — like they don't have the gear, the skill, the setup to pull something like that off — that's the Facade doing damage.
This BTS content wasn’t posted maliciously. Nobody is trying to make you feel bad. But when we only show the finished frame, the clean setup, the confident execution — I don’t think this as much as dishonesty as much as the fact that we're just leaving things out. The two hours it took to get the light right. The twelve frames that didn't work before the one that did. The client email that almost derailed the whole shoot. The doubt that sat in the room the entire time. The 3 years of shooting to gain the experience to accomplish that level of production.
And the person watching sees the curated polished version and compares it to their own full insecure messy reality. Their own doubt, their own failed frames, their own two hours of fighting the light. And they conclude: everyone else does this well. I'm the only one struggling.
Which is bullshit. That's the damage we’re talking about. Again, it’s not a lie, it’s just a page of a story that gets mistaken for the whole book.
The Facade doesn't have to be dishonest to be harmful. It just has to be selective.
Every creative who has ever felt like everyone else knows where they're going and they're the only one stumbling through the dark — that feeling is partly manufactured by the collective Facade we all maintain.
You're not the only one who can't see the trail. Most of us can't. It’s just that no one ever talks about it.
Which is the thing about the forest — the dark, dense, no-trail version — is that it looks the same whether you're lost or just between clearings.
From the inside, you can't tell the difference. The anxiety, the fear, it feels identical. The voice that says you've miscalculated, you’re lost, you fucked up, sounds the same whether you have or you haven't.
The only way to know is to keep walking. One foot infront of another.
And its not because you're certain. Not because you have a plan. But because the alternative — sitting under the tree, comfortable and safe, never starting again — that costs more than the uncertainty.
The Facade says: Of course I know where I'm going.
The truth is: I don't. But I know what happens if I stop, and it isn’t pretty.
Okay so I've been talking about myself for a while now. More than I'm usually comfortable with. It’s not something I am used to, which is why this episode feels like a camera has been poking around my colon for the past few weeks.
But really though, I don't think this is just my story.
I think you have a version of the forest. Maybe yours is a half-finished project that's been sitting in a folder for two years. Maybe it's a practice you built during a slow season and then abandoned when the work came back. Maybe it's the thing you make when nobody's watching that you've never shown anyone because you're not sure it's good enough or serious enough or the right kind of thing to be making.
I think you have a Episode 7 - My Friend Hue moment too. Where the encouragement from people who love you has dried up and it's just you and the work and the silence and you're not sure whether to keep going.
And I think you've been performing certainty about it. Presenting as someone who has a plan. Hiding the need underneath the making.
Here's what I'm not saying.
I'm not saying drop the professionalism. I'm not saying perform your anxiety as a content strategy or mistake oversharing for authenticity.
And I want to be honest about something. I think about this constantly. Every time I make an episode like this one — where the subject is me, where my mess is visible — I ask myself whether I'm saying something true or whether I'm performing the saying of something true. Whether I'm being vulnerable or doing a bit about being vulnerable. Those are not the same thing and the difference matters.
I don't always know the answer. The line is blurred sometimes. But I know the question is worth asking. And I think the moment you stop asking it is the moment the work stops being honest.
The Facade has a function. The polished frame is still worth making. The confident voice is still worth using. Not everything needs to be exposed. Not every dark part of the forest needs a guided tour.
What I'm saying is: know the difference between what you're choosing to keep private and what you're hiding because you're afraid. Finding a balance between professional judgement and showing your humanity is important.
You can be making something genuinely worth making and also making it because you need to. Both can be true. Most of the time, for most of us, both are true.
The Facade is pretending only one of them is real.
I still can't see where the trail leads.
Some weeks the light is brighter and the path opens up. Some weeks it's so dark I can only see a foot in front of my face. This week it nearly disappeared entirely and I almost sat down under a tree and called it good.
I didn't. You're listening to what happened when I kept walking.
The Facade says: I know where I'm going. I have a plan. I'm making this for you and I know exactly why it matters.
The truth is closer to: I'm making this because I have to. Because the alternative is sitting under that tree, comfortable and safe, and never wanting to get up again. And that terrifies me more than the dark.
If you're mid-forest right now — if the light has gone out and the trail has disappeared and you're not sure whether what you're making is landing or disappearing into silence — I don't have a map for you.
But I'm in there too. Somewhere ahead, or behind, or just off to the left.
Keep walking.
Stay curious. Stay courageous. Stay terrible.