A love letter to shame: Before it’s beautiful, let it be ugly
How creativity begins, our cone of shame, and a mannequin in a pothole
Chapter 7
What one mannequin in a hole can teach us about starting anyway
It started with a pothole.
And a mannequin.
And me, wondering what creativity actually is when life feels full of holes…emotional, logistical, and otherwise.
Let me explain.
James Coxall, a self-described “normal bloke” from Cambridgeshire, England, had finally had enough. For weeks, maybe months, a gaping crater in the middle of a quiet village road was ignored by the local council. The kind of pothole that rattles your teeth and tests your faith in basic infrastructure.
So James did what any delightfully unhinged adult with a sense of mischief and a few spare hours on a Sunday might do:
He dressed a mannequin in his 7-year-old daughter’s old clothes. Built a makeshift anchor to hold it in place…And then plunged it headfirst into the pothole.
Legs, sticking straight up. Like someone had attempted to dive into the road and vanished. It was startling. It was ridiculous. It was absolutely perfect. The kind of suburban spectacle you’d expect Banksy to orchestrate after a rough week.
A bit of satire. A bit of protest. A whole lot of brilliance.
The locals laughed. Facebook took notice. The media ran with it. And in just four days? The pothole was fixed.
Not because of another complaint or a petition. But because someone transformed frustration into a punchline…and a story.
It stuck with me. James didn’t create from stillness or silence or some muse descending in moonlight. He created from annoyance. From being overlooked. From a constraint that turned into a canvas.
Creativity doesn’t arrive on a cloud with a soundtrack. And innovation? Even more so. It doesn’t wait for ideal conditions. It sneaks in through the cracks of real life.
It shows up in the frustration, in a kitchen when the pasta’s overcooked, the deadline passed, and the cat just threw up on your notes. And still, some weird, stubborn part of you says: “Okay, but what if we try this anyway?”
That’s what makes creativity so human. It’s not the spark. It's stubbornness. It’s the refusal to go numb. The decision to make anything, even a mannequin in a pothole, out of the mess we’re handed.
We believe creativity comes from talent. Or time. Or vision. But so often, it comes from tension. From the unmet need. The unmet self.
The part of us that aches to be seen, heard, felt. And more often than not, it’s that part that shame tries to strangle first.
Let me tell you something I wish I had known earlier: I thought shame was just a shadow emotion, something you felt when you said the wrong thing, wore the wrong thing, or showed up too loudly. But shame is sneakier than that. It doesn’t just silence your voice. It silences your spark.
I’ve postponed more dreams than I care to count because of shame.
And most of the things weren’t because I lacked time. Or talent. But because shame told me I needed more of both. And I listened. Not knowing that shame rarely shouts. It simply makes you doubt the volume of your own voice.
I’ve sat on writing for weeks, months, because a voice in my head whispered:
“You don’t belong here.”
“You’re not smart enough to write this.”
“You should wait until you’re more qualified, more prepared, more…finished.”
More, more, more…Sound familiar?
That voice? It’s not caution. It’s shame in costume. It wears the mask of logic but speaks the language of fear. And it’s been gatekeeping our creativity for far too long.
What Brené Brown taught me about shame
If creativity had a public defender, it would be Brené Brown. Her research changed the way I see this entire dance between self-expression and self-protection.
“Unused creativity isn’t benign. It metastasizes. It lives within us until it’s expressed, neglected to death, or suffocated by resentment and fear.”— The Gifts of Imperfection
You should read that again. Slowly.
Unused creativity becomes a grudge against yourself.
It doesn’t just disappear. It festers. It fossilizes into hesitation, rusts into resentment. It doesn’t sit quietly in a corner, it grows teeth. It shows up as snark. As scrolling envy. As that sudden, inexplicable irritation when someone else does the thing you’ve been dreaming of.
It creeps into your mornings, your mirrors, your meetings. Until it’s not just a missed idea. It’s the quiet grudge you carry against your own potential.
The song you never recorded. The novel still gathering dust. The business plan scribbled in a notebook, tucked behind unpaid bills and recycled to-do lists.
They ideas don’t leave. They become ghosts that rattle at the edges of your daily life.
And they always whisper…“Maybe you would’ve been great…”
“But you’ll never know now.”
Ohhh that ‘You’ll never know now.” line. It haunts you.
And after enough time? Those ghosts don’t even feel like missed projects. They start to feel like proof. Proof that maybe you’re not creative after all. That maybe your best ideas are better off untried. Not because they were bad. But because you never let them breathe. And that’s the tragedy. Not the failing part. The not-even-trying.
Do you think you’re the only one carrying that silence?
You’re not.
According to Brené Brown, mirror-holder to our most tender truths, over 85% of the people she interviewed could trace a moment, often in childhood, when they were told, explicitly or not, that they weren’t creative.
Someone laughed at their drawing.
A teacher marked them wrong for coloring outside the lines.
A parent said “Maybe music just isn’t your thing.”
A sibling rolled their eyes when they sang off-key.
Tiny moments. But they landed like bricks.
It wasn’t always cruel. Sometimes it was careless. But it stuck. A tiny dismissal that bloomed into a lifelong belief: I’m not creative. And just like that, the door to creative self-expression closed. Not because it was locked, but because someone once laughed while you were trying to open it.
Where creativity actually lives
"There’s no such thing as creative people and non-creative people. There are only people who use their creativity and people who don’t."—Brené Brown
Science agrees with Brené. Creativity isn’t a magical gift reserved for novelists and jazz musicians and painters. It’s a biological process rooted in pattern recognition, emotional processing, and risk tolerance. Neuroscientists now believe that creativity doesn’t live in just one part of the brain, it’s a networked function.
It’s how the default mode network (imagination) overlaps with the executive function (decision-making) and the salience network (emotional relevance).
In simpler terms? Creativity = daydreaming + choosing + feeling.
It’s not a lightning bolt. It’s a conversation between your curiosity and your courage. Creativity occurs not when these work in isolation, but when they collaborate. Which means: It lives where contradiction does.
In the gap between wandering and structure. Intuition and analysis. Silence and expression. It doesn’t live in certainty. It lives in motion. And that’s where we trip. Because motion requires vulnerability. And when shame shows up, that conversation gets cut off.
You stop asking, “What if?”
You start asking, “What’s wrong with me?”
And shame is clever. It doesn’t barge in, it lingers.
“You’re not ready.”
“This is cringe.”
“Seriously? You’re calling that creative?”
It doesn’t need to be loud. It just needs to be consistent. Brené Brown has a name for this: Creative mortification…the moment a part of us dies on the page, the stage, the canvas, not because we failed, but because we were shamed for even trying.
And most of us? We never try again. Brown defines shame as the deeply painful belief that we are flawed and unworthy of love or connection.
Not “I made a bad thing.”
But “I am a bad thing.”
Not “That project flopped.”
But “I am a failure.”
That’s why shame is creativity’s deadliest enemy. It doesn’t just question our work, it erases our right to create at all.
She calls it the creativity–shame spiral:
You make something.
You feel vulnerable.
Shame says, “This is stupid. Who do you think you are?”
You retreat.
You stop.
Rinse. Repeat. Retreat.
And here’s the catch: We don’t even realize we’re doing it. We say we lack discipline, or motivation, or “just don’t have the time.” But underneath it? We’re often just nursing an old bruise.
“I was told in 4th grade I couldn’t sing. I haven’t sung since.”—Someone at one of Brené Brown’s workshops.
One sentence. Decades of silence.
How many of us are walking around with closeted canvases, half-written books, abandoned dance classes, poems we never shared? We think we outgrew them.
But maybe…we just never healed the shame that buried them.
Creativity in the cracks
We like to imagine creativity as a spotlight. A eureka. A perfectly lit desk in a perfectly aligned life. But the truth is, it often shows up in the cracks.
Not despite the chaos, but because of it. It lives in the five minutes before your next meeting. In the notes app at 3:17 AM. In the margins of a to-do list.
In your garage and half-scribbled notebooks. On a receipt, a napkin, the back of a bill. In the moment between the sigh and the next breath. Between self-doubt and self-belief.
Some of the most iconic stories, inventions, and songs? They weren’t born from luxury.
They were born from constraint. From discomfort. From a deep need to express something when the world felt too noisy, too indifferent, too silent. Creativity often starts as a coping mechanism before it ever becomes an offering.
A lifeline. A lighthouse.
A way to say:
“I’m still here. This is how I feel. This is what I see.”
It starts where there’s tension between who we are and who we’re pretending to be. It leaks through the gaps in our polished personas. It finds its way out through doodles, melodies, post-Its, jokes, spreadsheets, tattoos, Sunday dinners, handmade birthday cards, and last-minute costumes made from tinfoil.
It doesn’t wait for clarity. It doesn’t require a sabbatical. It knocks softly, and it waits to see if you’ll answer. And when you do?
Even imperfectly…
Even with shaky hands…
Something sacred begins to take root. Because the cracks don’t mean you’re broken.
They mean you’re porous.
And porosity is how the light gets in, and how the creativity gets out.
Dear Shame: A love letter
Because this edition is personal and because shame only shrinks in the light. I want to do what I’ve never let myself do before: Write a love letter to the thing that tried to keep me small.
Bare with me ok?
Dear Shame,
I know what you’re trying to do.
You think you’re protecting me…from embarrassment, from disappointment, from being exposed.
You’re trying to keep me safe.
I get it.
And I thank you.
But here’s the truth:
You’ve kept me silent when I had something to say.
You’ve kept me still when I wanted to dance.
You’ve kept me small when I longed to be seen.
You told me that creativity was indulgent.
That vulnerability was weak.
That only some people get to make art.
But I’m done letting you edit my sentences before they’re even written.
So I’m doing it differently now.
I’ll write with trembling hands.
I’ll share before I feel wise.
I’ll post even if no one claps.
Because silence isn’t safety. It’s exile.
And I’m done living outside my own life.
With respect, but not obedience,
Eleni
Let me pause here and ask: What has shame stolen from you?
A project? A story? A part of yourself that still wants out? Because maybe that pothole in your creative life…That thing that’s been ignored, avoided, painted over, Isn’t the end of the road. Maybe it’s the place where something unexpected begins.
Even if you have to shove a mannequin in it to get noticed.
Constraints don’t crush the muse. They call her forth.
Last week I briefly mentioned the “Adjacent Possible,” a theory by Stuart Kauffman, who explains this beautifully: Creativity doesn’t happen by leaping forward. It happens by stepping sideways, into the next door that only appeared because you took the last step.
Every time you create under pressure, with less than you hoped for, you’re dancing with that principle.
The blank canvas is terrifying because it holds everything. But give yourself only black ink and a 5-minute timer? Now your brain wakes up.
We tend to think of creativity as something that needs wide-open space. Endless time. A pristine whiteboard and a freshly brewed coffee. No interruptions, no deadlines, no mess. But that’s a lie we tell ourselves. Creativity doesn’t bloom in the absence of pressure. It sharpens in the presence of it.
Constraints, the very things we resist, are often the reason anything gets made at all. Time limits, financial gaps, emotional tension, limited tools, imperfect timing. These aren’t barriers to creative work. They’re part of the blueprint.
They force us to make choices. To strip away the excess. To get scrappy. To stop waiting for ideal conditions and create something from what’s already in our hands.
Constraints don’t crush the muse. They call her forth.
Some of the most striking art in history was born not in abundance, but in limitation.
These weren’t anomalies. They were proof.
1. Japanese Haikus
A haiku gives you just three lines. Seventeen syllables. That’s all. Yet somehow, it contains entire seasons, whole universes of emotion, love letters to cherry blossoms, and reflections on death. That’s not despite the form. That’s because of it.
2. Renaissance Frescoes
Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel lying on his back with paint that dried too fast and scaffolding that never quite cooperated.
He didn’t have Photoshop or AI or endless color palettes. He had patience. Limitations. Walls. And still, he gave us heaven. Limited pigments, enormous walls that ended up to new visual languages, light, shadow, dimension.
3. Gospel Music
Picture a cramped room. No grand piano. No proper mic. Just voices and conviction. Gospel didn’t need polish. It had power. Born in limitation, raised in community, gospel harmonies weren’t just melodies, they were declarations. Soul-stirring soundscapes rooted in resistance and hope.
4. Wartime Recipes
Eggs replaced with vinegar. Flour stretched with potatoes. Mothers and grandmothers turned scarcity into survival, and somehow, into flavor. Some of the most beloved dishes in the world came from a place of not enough.
5. Street Murals
Take a walk through any city where the walls are cracked and the paint is peeling. There, in decay, you’ll find masterpieces. Street artists don’t sand down imperfections, they paint through them. Graffiti doesn’t wait for canvas. It takes what’s broken and turns it into a message. Art that refuses to be ignored.
Because what no one tells you when you’re dreaming of the perfect time to create is that lack of freedom sharpens your vision.
The lack of polish, gives you grit.
The lack of time? Forces you to choose what matters most.
When your palette is small, you paint with more intention. When your canvas is broken, your story has more layers. When your studio is a cluttered kitchen table between dinner and the school run, your work becomes life itself.
As filmmaker Orson Welles once said, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”
Creativity isn’t waiting for your circumstances to improve. It’s waiting for you to get curious with what’s already here.
Let’s zoom out for a second.
According to research published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, people who were given constraints, not complete freedom, produced more original solutions.
Psychologists call this functional fixedness disruption, a fancy phrase for what happens when your brain is forced to find new uses for old things.
It’s the magic of the pivot.
And sometimes, it’s also the birthplace of style.
I think about this a lot when I remember my younger self. Constraints didn’t just box her in. They gave her direction. They gave her permission. That’s the thing about limitations: They teach you to trust your resourcefulness more than your resources.
And when I look back? I realize that most of my creative breakthroughs didn’t arrive wrapped in clarity. They were disguised as disappointments.
The job I lost that led me somewhere unexpected, and somehow more honest.
The misalignment that led me to the biggest failure of my career, only to lead me back to myself, and into a new era of my life.
The rejection that made me sharpen my voice until it cut through the noise.
(And for those wondering, yes, I’m in that phase again. The creative one. The slightly unhinged one. The deliciously delusional one. The “Wait, am I really doing this?” one.)
So the next time you feel hemmed in by your limitations, time, money, space, perfectionism, don’t see them as fences. See them as frames.
The frame makes the painting. The meter makes the poem. The cracked wall makes the mural unforgettable. Let your constraint become your signature. Your obstacle, your fingerprint. Because what you create against the odds often becomes the work that defines you.
A soft place to land for all the unfinished things
Shame is sneaky. It doesn’t need logic. It doesn’t need truth. It just needs one crack in your confidence, and it slithers in like smoke.
It doesn’t always slam the door. It rearranges the room so you forget how to enter. Until what you wanted to say fades under the weight of what you thought you were supposed to say.
But the real loss? It isn’t that we fall short. It’s that we stop showing up.
Shame turns creativity into performance. And performance into paralysis.
And yet, each time you create anyway…Each time you dare to share the raw, unfinished, trembling version, you’re building a life where shame doesn’t get the final word. Because here’s what creativity actually asks of us:
Not brilliance.
Not certainty.
Not applause.
Just the courage to begin. And the kindness to keep going when you’re tempted to delete it all. But shame makes that hard, doesn’t it?
Because it whispers,
“If you were really creative, this wouldn’t feel so scary.”
“If you were talented, this would be easier.”
And worst of all:
“What’s the point? No one will care.”
That voice doesn’t come from truth. It comes from a memory, a scar, a comment someone made in fourth grade. The time someone laughed at your poem. The grade that told you you were “bad at art.” The moment you decided to play it safe. To shrink. To quit.
Shame’s lie is that creativity should come easy. Its trap is silence. Its cost? Your voice.
So if shame told you not to try…
Try anyway.
This edition is for the little me.
The girl who danced in her bedroom but never auditioned. Who wrote whole novels in her diary but never called herself a writer. Creativity is still here.
She’s still here. And so am I.
Because creativity doesn’t demand brilliance. It only asks that you stay. That you show up when you’d rather disappear. That you make something, even if it’s made of doubt and duct tape.
That you become…publicly.
That you let the unfinished things breathe.
So if you’ve tucked parts of yourself away, because someone laughed, or graded, or didn’t understand, this is your invitation to bring them home.
Your creativity never left. It’s just been waiting for a softer place to land.
Shame isn’t anymore a monster under the bed
Maybe it’s more like one of those awkward plastic cones they put on dogs after surgery. You know the one, bulky, loud, designed to stop you from hurting yourself.
But also? It makes it nearly impossible to move freely, to see clearly, to trust your own instincts.
You know that moment in Up, when Dug, the dog, lowers his head and mumbles:
“I do not like the Cone of Shame.”
Same, Dug.
Same.
I think most of us walk around wearing invisible cones.Bumping into our own brilliance. Convinced we’re protecting ourselves…when really, we’re just trying not to make eye contact with our creativity.
But you can take it off now. The stitches have healed. You’re allowed to scratch the itch again.
To chase the idea.
To make the thing.
Even if it’s still messy.
Even if it’s not done.
Next week: We go deeper. We talk about vulnerability, about failure, and the holy ache of letting someone witness the thing before it’s ready, and maybe…witnessing you.
Thanks to Brené Brown’s decades of research, we now have the language for wounds we carried silently. The quiet shame that made us hide our art. The fear of not being enough that stopped us before we began. Next time, we’ll walk straight into the discomfort. We’ll explore why the things we don’t want to show are often the most human, the most brave, the most beautiful.
Because the heart of creativity isn’t mastery. It’s the willingness to be seen in your becoming.
🎯 Creative Exercise: Write your story in six words
Ernest Hemingway once wrote: “For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.”
Six words. One story. Infinite ache.
Legend has it, he called it his best work.
This is your invitation to do the same.
Why?
Because constraints sharpen creativity. Because brevity is power. Because when we silence the fluff, what’s left is the truth.
Tell me something real.
A heartbreak. A failure. A rebirth. A regret. A soft truth you almost didn’t say.
💬 Drop your six-word story in the comments.
I’ll start:
“Dreamed loud. Shrunk small. Woke up.”
Your turn.
Until next time, write the line. Sing the note. Break the silence. Publish the post.
Stay soft. Stay messy.
Gloriously yours,
Eleni
Every Monday at 11:30 CET, the Glorious Fail will meet you where you are, ready to disrupt, challenge, and rebrand failure.
There are plenty of ways to support the Glorious Fail:
→ If this landed a little too close to home, give it a like.
→ If you have thoughts, feedback, or just want to say hi, drop a comment.
→ And If it cracked something open and want to spread the word, hit that restack button below.
The Glorious Fail is just getting started, and every interaction brings it to life. Let’s fail forward, together. Rebrand failure. Reclaim the story. Rewrite what comes next.
I like the concept of ignoring your creativity doesn’t make it disappear but actually makes it grow inside you more but negatively, internal resentment you just ignore.
That mannequin in the pothole is the hero I didn’t know I needed. What a metaphor for starting imperfectly.