When Creativity Feels Dangerous

How a tarot reading helped me trace my fear of being seen back to its roots.

Last night, I had an epiphany.

For the past month, I’ve been doing my own tarot challenge, focused on healing my relationship with health and creativity. Over the last few days, my cards have been… blunt. Its message?

It’s time to share.

It’s time to be seen.

This was fully shown to me last night when my prompt was ‘Where am I still holding back?’ and I pulled the 3 of Pentacles and 6 of Swords. I read them together as a nudge: it’s time to step into creative collaboration, but there’s still a mental block keeping me from moving forward. My oracle cards echoed the message with Authenticity and Strength.

3 of Pentacles tarot card

At first, I was confused. I already share my writing here. I post my art on Instagram. Sure, I hesitate before hitting “publish,” but I do it. So what was I still holding back? Sharing my work has always been hard, which was why I turned to Substack actually, as a way to desensitize the anxiety that surrounds sharing my writing.

But why does sharing my creativity still feel so scary?

That question stuck with me for hours last night until I started connecting the dots. For whatever reason I started thinking about an incident from YEARS ago where I screwed up and got the whole family sick. The family was rightfully angry at me, and expressed that anger to me. Which caused a domino effect on my mental health. I fell into a deep depression that included relentless intrusive thoughts, to the point where I tried acting on them. I did eventually pull myself out of that hole, but this incident kept me in a choke hold for well over a year.

While yes, it sucks to screw up and pay the price, it’s something that happens, and SHOULD happen, in a normal life span. Multiple times. In fact, it’s how we grow and mature into responsible adults. We view our grandparents as wise, but why? Because they have lived life, experienced the good along with the bad.

So looking back on this incident that happened nearly 15 years ago, and still feeling shame over it, really stuck with me. And that’s when I started going deeper.

I was born into the JW religion, which is a very high control organization. It’s a tight knit community with the expectation that you only need other JW people in your life. You were discouraged from making friends at school or through work. You were not allowed to participate in extra curricular activities. And you do NOT date outside the organization.

With that, they heaped on the shame too. If you screw up, you’ll die in Armageddon. God knows what you are thinking, so don’t even think thoughts that could get you killed. If you are unrepentant, you will be shunned and you will lose EVERYTHING…

I left that organization and I was shunned. I lost everyone but my father, grandfather, great aunt, my now husband and one friend I met through work. My entire community not only turned their backs on me, but called me to tell me what a horrible person I was. I had letters sent to me accusing me that I was killing my mom because she was heart broken I left. How selfish I was for only thinking of myself.

My own mother refused to talk to me for ten years.

A decade.

Looking back at my experience as a child and young adult, it makes sense why I had such a visceral reaction to my family getting mad at me. I was taught from an early age that when you mess up, you will be abandoned by everyone. Including god.

So how does this relate to sharing my creations?

I think there is still a part of me that worries if I mess up, I’ll be judged. And my nervous system equates judgment as abandonment. I know, intellectually, that feedback won’t kill me. But my body—the one that still remembers being cut off by everyone I loved—doesn’t always agree.

And that’s what I’m trying to teach myself now:

That creativity isn’t dangerous.

That being seen doesn’t always lead to being shunned.

That the nervous system isn’t the enemy. It just needs new evidence.