Lifting An Opaque Curtain
On honest leadership, instinct, and trying not to shape-shift your way through the work.
Here’s what I keep coming back to: Creative leadership starts by showing up.
Not with a title or a process doc or a “north star,” but with real presence. With curiosity. With actual opinions. With an interest in where creativity is going—not just where it’s already been.
The version I admire most isn’t rigid or rehearsed.
It’s thoughtful, inquisitive, a little restless. It listens. It asks good questions. It makes space for different viewpoints without immediately labeling them as misalignment.
And it knows how to say “I don’t know yet” without collapsing into uncertainty.
Sometimes you find yourself inside a system that doesn’t really want that specific brand of leadership.
Curiosity gets called indecision. Optimism reads as naïveté. And suddenly you’re spending more time managing perceptions than making the actual work better.
This sort of nonsense starts happening: you start self-editing mid-sentence. You send the Slack message, then delete it. You wonder if the reason things feel off is you—maybe you’re not fast enough, not tough enough, not “leader” enough.
But sometimes that tension isn’t about your ability—it’s about the structure you’re working inside. The version of leadership being asked of you might be a mismatch. And that’s worth paying attention to.
There’s a moment, usually a quiet one, when you start to ask harder questions:
Can I lead in a way that feels honest here? Can I do this work without constantly translating myself into something more palatable? Or am I shape-shifting every day just to stay afloat?
Sometimes that means letting go of places that don’t fit.
Sometimes it means redefining what “fitting” even looks like.
Eventually, all those tangled questions begin to sort themselves out. Not perfectly, but clearly enough to follow. You start to trust your instincts again. You begin to recognize what makes your approach different, and you stop apologizing for it.
There’s relief in that. And momentum.
Because once you understand what kind of leader you want to be—what kind of creative life you want to build—it becomes easier to make choices that support it.
The ground steadies. The next step feels less like a guess, and more like a decision.
And from there, you begin again: not in a box, not in a title, but in a way that feels fully your own.
Not easy, not perfect, but yours.
And if you’re here, reading this—maybe you’re in that in-between place too.
Sorting through a version of the same questions.
Trying to figure out what feels right, what doesn’t, and what might come next if you start listening a little more closely to your own instincts. When something clicks and you think, “OK yes, more of that please.”
Start by taking stock:
What feels good at the end of the day?
Where do you feel most like yourself in the work?
What version of creative leadership actually energizes you?
And which parts of the system feel like a constant shapeshift?
These realizations rarely arrive all at once, they come in fragments. In brief conversations, while doomscrolling tiktok, in the things you say out loud to a friend, in fleetingly prophetic shower thoughts.
That’s the work. We can't fix everything, can't map it all out. We can just choose the next step with a little more truth in it than the one before.
And wherever this creative journey leads—I suppose we're now in this together.
