This week on Honestly, Dear Listener, we’re talking about something very scary indeed—what if we’re not actually special? If you’re anything like us, you were raised with the idea firmly planted in your brain that you were exceptional. This has served you some of the time, but it also plopped a huge helping of pressure on you when it came to creativity. Because if you make “bad art,” it would prove that you’re not actually as special as you thought. So you stick to things you’re inherently good at. And boy is that limiting!

Hence, the scary supposition that maybe we’re not actually as special as we think we are. No longer believing in our exceptionalism frees us up to make “bad art” (which is really just fertilizer for the good art we make after we get all the “bad art” out of our systems. We can make “mistakes.” We can expand into new things instead of feeling boxed in by the need to stick to the safe things we know we’re already good at.

We also discuss Emily anxiety in reference to a big gig she has coming up and what it was like growing up in the 90s.