I Hate Creating Content. So Why Can't I Stop?

I'd make this one slightly more intimate because someone encountering it as a podcast doesn't need as much SEO-oriented setup:

I hate creating content. And yet, no matter how many times I want to walk away from it, something keeps calling me back.

In this episode, I'm turning the lens inward and asking why being visible feels so difficult for me—even after years of teaching, public speaking, coaching and leading rooms full of people.

What starts as a question about content creation becomes something much deeper: a reflection on perfectionism, inherited wounds, my reliance on formulas, obedience, self-policing, and the strange discomfort of stepping out of the role of expert and allowing myself to simply be seen.

I'm also reflecting on three messages that found me at exactly the right time and challenged me to think differently about disobedience, creativity and my need for acceptance.

I don't have a neat answer at the end of this one. I'm practicing putting something into the world even when I'm still wondering, Does this help anybody? Am I just babbling? Does any of this matter?

And putting it out anyway. 

Transcript

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Hey Harriet, welcome back to Michaela Unmuted. The last few weeks I've been picking something in popular culture to dive deeper into. This week I want to look more internally. When I thought about the question that I wanted to cover this week, what overwhelmingly I've been stuck in is this wrestling I've been doing with my own visibility wound. If you're new here, you might not know that you're catching me in the middle of a thought experiment. Meaning I've really struggled to create content. So while I'm relatively unknown and my page is relatively small, I'm using this period to just get comfortable with speaking out into the world, out into the void. And I keep asking myself, why is this so hard for me? Especially when I've been a professor, I've been a public speaker, I'm currently a coach that leads trainings for organizations that have 20 people, that have 300 people. I am trying to understand why creating content feels so unnatural to me. And when I ask myself why keep doing this, even when it makes me feel so desperately uncomfortable, underneath it, there is this calling, A, to not only participate in the wider conversations that society is having, because I have so many opinions. Boy, do I have opinions. But even more deeply, especially getting older, I still feel called to challenge myself, to evolve myself, to do the things that are the most scary to me. One would assume that it would be easy to stay in the lanes where I've already put in the time and feel comfortable. But deep down, I know that the purpose of life is to continue to evolve. And so I think a lot of what I'm doing here is part of pushing the walls out from around me, stepping into spaces where I'm a novice when I'm used to being an expert. But also I feel deeply in my core that there is a deeper calling for me to have a voice in a way that I've never had before, that the women in my family have never had before. My mother's mother, my grandmother, was well known in the tiny little village she lived in in Jamaica. She was the first person in that community to ever own a car. She was an assistant to a very well-known businessman, and many people say she ran his business. At one time, he even went to her and said, hey, let's start a business together. And for whatever reason, she felt safer and better being behind the scenes, being hidden. My mother always says I remind her a lot of my grandmother. And honestly, I do believe I've inherited a lot of her wounds. So part of me evolving and stepping into spaces that she never allowed for herself, I'm not only doing it for me, I'm doing it for her. I'm doing it for our future generations. And so underneath this deep, deep desire to wrap this all up, turn off the laptop, go back to the life when I never created content, where I was never active on any social media platforms, underneath all of that is this deep, deep calling to level up in ways that I've never leveled up before, to learn lessons that I've never felt ready for, to break down some of the inherited trauma that has really governed my life to this point. The more I do this, the more I notice patterns about myself. And one of them is I level formula. I obtained my PhD in my 20s. And while there were many things I didn't love about that process, I love that the doctoral process is very formulaic. There's particular classes you take, there's particular papers you write, there's particular deadlines, particular benchmarks. And as long as I kept my eye on that prize, I was able to almost like a video game, learn the level, learn the obstacles in that level and figure out how to overcome them. When I started my first business, that was incredibly scary for me because there was no formula. I took all the business classes, I read all the books, I talked to all the mentors. But at the end of the day, when you put something out into the world, you can't really force or determine how an audience of consumers is going to engage with it. So it took me many, many years to find my groove, to figure out what parts of my strength match what the public wanted. And I feel like in the last five to seven years, I've really stepped into being an entrepreneur. In this phase of life, I'm learning that even when you are a successful entrepreneur, there are still points and periods of evolution. That after you master a level of how to run a business, how to make a good living from a business, if you do it right, there will be a calling for you to figure out what that next step is for you. In many ways, this feels like my next step. I feel called to something bigger, something less contained and more based on what I actually put out onto the world to strangers that have no reference point for me. That feels very unknown, but also really necessary. I would say about five years ago, I really started to commit to decolonizing myself, acknowledging my internalized patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism. And part of that process was appreciating how, in many ways, I didn't even need those systems to police me. I was policing myself for those systems. That has shown up in how I create content. When I first tried to create content, I was reading a teleprompter. I wanted to get every word right. I was researching every single video that I made, making sure that I dotted all my T's, crossed all my I's, my inner perfectionist was raging, and I was working really hard to make the perfect product that would please the most people. I also felt really called to make all of my videos incredibly informational. I felt driven to delve into the deepest, darkest corners of cultural commentary and make sure I had the point that no one else had. That felt like so much pressure, so much preparation. And in many ways, I wasn't able to connect with an audience. I'm still not connecting with a wide audience, but I am getting more comfortable with being more whimsical, less tailored, more authentic, more off the cuff. That is the content that I make that gets the biggest response. And for me, that feels like the universe is telling me the less prepared you are, the less protective of yourself that you are, the more likely that you will create content that resonates. That has been very counter all the ways I have worked to stay safe in the past. Getting a doctorate, running a business, being a coach, being a professor. So much of that relies on me being the one with all the answers. It feels a bit insane that I'm feeling called to create content where I admit that I have none of the answers, where the content isn't perfect, where I'm maybe not imparting a tool, a tip, a strategy, but still feel like what I'm saying has value. I'm a big believer that the universe is always talking to you. If you pay attention, you will see synchronicities all around you. And I have learned that when I ask questions in my mind to myself, the universe rises up to show me answers all over the place. So last week, as I was wrestling on what I was gonna put into this week's video, when I was realizing that I kind of wanted to talk about my visibility wounds, the universe sent me three different points of content that gave me direction and solace that I'm excited to share with you. So the first one would be around disobedience, which I think is very much tied to me stepping into a space where I live my life less formalaically. I watched a video about how the slaves that were brought to Jamaica specifically were the most disobedient slaves. Now I had heard this concept before. I had heard people say this before that the slaves that went to Jamaica and Haiti in particular were the least obedient Africans that they captured on the West Coast. This video reframed that to say that most of the Africans that went to Jamaica and Haiti and Barbados and certain parts of the Caribbean, they actually came from the warrior class in West Africa. So the slaveholders eventually were able to capture the best warriors in Africa, the ones who typically tend to reign over their region. And those particular slaves were brought to the islands of Jamaica, Barbados, and Haiti. I was born in Jamaica, my entire family is Jamaican. And I found that such a beautifully encouraging reframe. I had always heard that we were the least behaved, that we were the most, as Jamaicans would say, in bad mind. But to reframe that is least behaved but best warrior, one has so much of a better connotation. And it made me realize that my cultural genealogy is rooted in disobedience, that the ancestors that I come from are the ones who fought against power. And because as an immigrant, I have been taught by my immigrant parent and the rest of society that obedience is my ticket to safety. In many ways, stepping into my disobedience feels so uncomfortable because I have to wade through layers and layers and layers of colonization and socialization. But if I can get to the root of my inherited disobedience, then I could be more in alignment with myself. The second point of helpful information that I received this week was when I listened to a podcast called Almost 30. I absolutely love these girls. They do a lot of work specifically for women through a spiritual lens. And they had a guest on this week named Elise Loman. And she talked about how the seven deadly sins are used more often to police women and their humanity. We look at a sin like gluttony, and we look at how society specifically polices women's body, especially in the age of Ozempic, Ariana Grande's, Dad Buzz being cool, very, very, very anorexic thin, being the standard for women. A lot of the seven deadly skins, because those have been policed by patriarchy, have been wielded the most on women. And these reframes are really helpful for me because sometimes these rules are so internalized and accepted by women because everything around us tells us there are problems. The ability to see societal standards as problematic, inappropriately gendered, unfairly distributed helps to free you from that voice in your head that's always telling you to play by the rules of the gate. So again, that was my second message this week around obedience and almost interrogating how the way that my internal monologue is so harsh with me is in service of religion and societal rules and standards that police me as a woman, me particularly as a black woman, more harshly. All of that being imaginary and a tool of the system. And then the third message I got this week was watching an amazing video between Tanahasi Koch and Hassan Minaj. I love Tanahasi Koch. I actually love Hassan Minaj too. They're actually two men whose intellect I really, really respect. And that doesn't happen that often, unfortunately. But Tanahasi was talking about how we learn to not care what people thought, how that was so important to his process as an artist and a creator and a contributor to the wider Zeitgeist. You look at someone like Tanyas Sakoj, who is so gifted and such a beautiful writer, and you think this man never felt insecure about his writing because it's so natural to him and it's so organic and it's so beautiful and it's so captivating. But to hear him admit that he had to wrestle with his own visibility wounds, he talks about when he wrote the first book, not really expecting it to have such critical acclaim, so that when he started to receive it, he was so deeply this uncomfortable with it. He talks about wrestling with being famous and how he desires 90% of it to go away. Hearing somebody who is so obviously living in his calling, living in his highest good, living as his best self in such an intentional and conscientious way, also struggle with the visibility wound, especially as a man, especially as a successful man, especially as a fearless man, is really, really powerful. And so again, I'm getting all these messages that are telling me be disobedient, tap into your warrior side. And part of the thing that you're fighting is your need within yourself to be accepted. All of those things seem so obvious, but are so hard to remember when I'm sitting in front of my phone and I'm pressing record and my mind shuts down and overloads and gets overwhelmed by all the ways I want to be perfect and all the ways I want to be in service to the audience, or else why would they care or want to listen to me? It has been very, very helpful to receive these messages to remind me of the privilege of leaning into my humanity. I think for me, my current goal is to learn how to be myself authentically with an unknown audience. I think my goal for myself right now is to learn how to speak into the world in a way where I don't have to be perfect, where I don't say the things just so I feel safe, where I don't feel compelled to offer value without appreciating that my presence enough is of value. That's what I want to focus on now. That's what I want to continue explore. I hope you all enjoy going through this journey with me.