Who are you when you're not creating: an identity that is your work

The opening night was on Friday. Applause, flowers, a party until two in the morning, messages from friends. On Saturday morning she woke into silence and didn’t know what to do with herself. Not in the sense of what to do that day, but deeper: who she was now that the show no longer needed making. “When I’m not working, I don’t exist.” I hear this sentence from creative people more often than I would expect. It is usually followed by: “It’s not that I’m bored. It’s as if I’ve been switched off.”

People who make a living from creative work — musicians, directors, designers, writers, actors — often recognise themselves in that sentence. Their work is not a job they leave at five o’clock. It is a way of seeing, a calling, sometimes the only place where they feel truly alive. That is precious. But it has a shadow side too: when the work becomes the only proof that you exist, every break, every bad review and every project that doesn’t happen starts to feel like a threat to you.

In this post I want to look at how a creative identity that fuses with the work comes about, what research on contingent self-worth and passion says about it, and what you can do so that your worth stands on more than one leg.

When a vocation isn’t a job

Most people have some distance from their work. They do it well, perhaps happily, but when they get home they are a parent, a partner, a friend, someone who goes hiking on Sundays. In creative professions this distance is often smaller, and not by chance. Creative work demands that you put yourself into it: your taste, your memories, your feelings. A song you write carries your voice. A photograph carries your way of looking. That is why criticism of the work is so quickly experienced as criticism of the person.

On top of that, creative people often start early. A child who knew at ten that they would play the violin built their whole adult self around it. There was no period of searching for who they were — the answer was already there. Psychologists sometimes call this identity foreclosure: a person commits to a role before they have explored other possibilities. It isn’t necessarily bad. But it becomes fragile when the role disappears or is shaken.

And finally there is the environment. In the creative industries everything is public and everything is measured: views, tickets sold, reviews, awards, followers. Your work doesn’t only express you; it constantly ranks you too. I have written more about what identity is and how it forms in the knowledge base under identity.

Contingent worth: what the research says

The psychologist Jennifer Crocker and her colleagues studied what people build their sense of self-worth on. Her questionnaire measures seven domains on which self-worth can depend: others’ approval, appearance, outdoing others, success at work or study, family support, virtue and faith. Most people have a few of these domains more strongly emphasised. The key question isn’t whether you care about achievement, but how far your worth depends on it.

In 2004 Crocker and Lora Park summed up what happens when self-worth is strongly contingent on one domain. With success a person feels wonderful — but only briefly. With failure they fall a long way. Such a person therefore lives in constant readiness, as if sitting an exam that has to be passed again every day. It is exhausting, it breeds anxiety and, paradoxically, it often lowers the very quality of the work it is meant to protect: when you are worth only as much as your work is good, it is hard to allow yourself risk, play and mistakes.

In creative people this cycle often shows up as fear of the next piece of work: if the last one was a success, the next one has to be even better, or it will turn out you were just a fluke. I write about this in When success becomes an expectation: fear of the next piece of work. A related experience is being unable to take your successes in — described in Impostor syndrome: why successful people doubt themselves.

Passion that carries you, and passion that owns you

The Canadian psychologist Robert Vallerand and his colleagues distinguished between two kinds of passion. Harmonious passion means you love an activity and have chosen it freely; it is an important part of you, but it doesn’t fill the whole space. Obsessive passion means you have taken the activity on out of inner pressure — because your self-worth or your sense of being accepted depends on it. From the outside they look alike: both people work a lot, with commitment and enthusiasm.

The difference shows when there is no work. A person with harmonious passion can put down the guitar, go to dinner with friends and be genuinely present there. A person with obsessive passion thinks about the guitar at dinner, feels guilty for not being at home, and feels a restlessness that only work can soothe. Research links harmonious passion with more positive emotions during and after the activity, and obsessive passion with more conflict with other areas of life, with rumination and with burnout.

It is important to say that this isn’t a division into good and bad creators. Most people have a mixture of both, and the balance shifts with periods of life and circumstances. Before an important deadline or after a disappointment, even harmonious passion can tighten. The question is where you return to once the pressure eases.

One pillar or several

In the 1980s the psychologist Patricia Linville proposed a concept she called self-complexity. People differ in how many separate aspects make up their picture of themselves: I’m a musician, I’m a brother, I’m someone who loves cooking, I’m a neighbour, I’m a runner. Her research suggested that people with more relatively separate aspects react less severely to stress in one area — because a bad day in one doesn’t flood all the others. Later research showed the link is more complicated than it first seemed, but the basic picture remains useful.

For a creative person whose identity is their work, the building rests on a single pillar. As long as the pillar stands, all is well, perhaps even excellent. But when it wobbles — because of a bad review, a cancelled project, an injury that makes playing impossible, or simply the silence between two works — there is nothing else holding things up. That is why losing a role is so often experienced by creative people as losing themselves. People who go through retirement and the loss of a role know a similar experience.

Why rest doesn’t work

Creative people whose work and identity have grown together often say they don’t know how to rest. They go on holiday and on the third day start sketching. They have a free weekend and spend it feeling guilty. This isn’t laziness about resting or a lack of discipline. If work is the only proof that you are worth something, rest is literally dangerous: in the quiet, the question of who you are without work can surface, and the answer seems too frightening to listen to.

The researcher Sabine Sonnentag spent many years studying what helps people recover from work. One of the key ingredients is psychological detachment — actually not being at work in your mind during your free time. People who can detach are generally less exhausted and more satisfied, without being any less engaged at work. For creative people detachment is even harder, because the work doesn’t need an office: an idea comes in the shower, a melody while driving. So for them rest is less a question of schedule and more a question of permission. You’ll find more on what rest actually is in the knowledge base under rest, and if you have been exhausted for a long time, it is worth reading Burnout is not laziness.

Where it comes from

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, the question “who are you when you’re not creating” always leads to the question “when did you learn that you are seen when you make something”. For many creative people this was how it was in childhood. A child who drew beautifully got attention that otherwise wasn’t there. A child who played the piano was the family’s pride, but nobody asked how they felt. This isn’t about blaming parents. They often carried a similar story themselves. It is about a rule that took shape in a relationship and that the adult carries forward without ever saying it out loud: I am loved for what I create.

This is how it might show up in a session (a composite conversation, not a real person):

“When I was little, I drew all day. My mum hung the drawings all over the flat.”
“What was it like when you weren’t drawing?”
“… I don’t know. I don’t remember anyone saying anything.”
“As if you didn’t matter then?”
“As if I wasn’t there. Like now, when I’m not working.”

This rule often speaks up as an inner critic that asks, at every break, what you’ve done today. Where that voice comes from is the subject of The inner critic: where the voice that constantly judges you comes from. When a person recognises the voice as one that was once outside them, they can begin to listen to it differently — not as the truth, but as an old memory.

Exercise: who else I am

This exercise doesn’t ask you to give up your work or love it less. It only asks you to look at what else stands beside it. Take twenty minutes and a sheet of paper.

1. Finish the sentence “I am …” ten times, without thinking too hard. For example: “I am a pianist”, “I am a daughter”, “I am someone who laughs at bad films.”
2. Circle the ones connected to work. If more than half are, just note it, without judgement.
3. Next to each uncircled line, write when you last gave it time without thinking about work. If you can’t remember, that’s information, not a failing.
4. Pick one of these lines and give it one hour this week in which you create nothing anyone could see or judge. A walk, cooking, playing with a child, playing an instrument just for yourself.
5. After that hour, write one sentence: what did you feel when you weren’t being “productive”? Guilt, restlessness, relief, boredom? Every answer is the right one, and each says something about how much your worth hangs on your work.

The concept of play often helps with this exercise: an activity you do for its own sake, with no result. Many creative people started their work as play and lost the play precisely when the work became a profession.

When being fused with your work isn’t a problem

I don’t want to give the impression that a strong bond with your work is unhealthy in itself. For many people work is a source of deep meaning, and that is good. Creativity — more on it in the knowledge base under creativity — is one of the things that give life colour and meaning. Periods of intense work, when everything else steps into the background for a few weeks, are part of every serious creative process and are not a sign of a disorder.

Nor is there a rule that everyone should have a perfectly balanced life with equal parts work, family, hobbies and rest. That would just be another ideal to feel not good enough against. The question isn’t how much time you give to work, but what happens to you when there is no work. If you can bear a break, a bad review or a cancelled project with pain but without feeling that you have disappeared, your identity is probably more flexible than you think.

And finally: sometimes the emptiness between projects isn’t a question of identity but of depression. If the emptiness lasts for weeks, if you lose pleasure in everything and not only in work, and your sleep and appetite change, it makes sense to see a doctor. I have written about how depression intertwines with creative work in Creativity and depression: the myth of the suffering artist.

What can help in therapy

In psychotherapy we don’t try to “peel” a creative person away from their work. We try to find a space where they can be worth something even when they aren’t creating. It often starts with small observations: how they talk about themselves after a bad rehearsal, what they feel when someone tells them they love them, just like that. In the relationship with a therapist a person can experience something they may not have known before: that they are interesting and important even when they have nothing to show.

Learning a different relationship with yourself helps here too. Research on self-compassion shows that kindness towards yourself after a failure doesn’t reduce motivation, as people often fear, but helps you return to work more easily. There’s more on this in Self-compassion instead of self-criticism. Creative people often fear that without strict inner discipline they will become mediocre. Experience suggests the opposite: once your worth is no longer on trial, the freedom to try, miss and try again comes back.

When identity widens, the work doesn’t shrink. It simply becomes one of the places where you are — not the only place where you exist. If you are reading this in English and it speaks to you, I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana.

What to remember

• In creative people work and identity often fuse, because the work expresses who they are — that is precious, but fragile.
• Contingent worth means you are worth only as much as your latest piece of work is good. Success brings a brief lift, failure a deep fall.
• Harmonious passion carries you, obsessive passion owns you. A break shows the difference, not the amount of work.
• An identity resting on several pillars copes better when one of them wobbles.
• If the emptiness between projects lasts for weeks and takes in everything, it may be depression — see a doctor.