The heavy feeling

Why creative breakthrough requires understanding the gap

The heavy feeling. There’s something you really want to do or become or create. Something stands between it and you. Stands with one foot on your chest. It feels like a cloud or a pressure weighing you down. In some, it triggers anxiety, a panic felt in the heart or a shortness of breath, and above all an urgency to distract or shift focus to something, anything else.

It’s the weight of your own expectations when the current moment doesn’t have something to show for it. The universe is off-kilter, starting with you.

The heavy feeling is intellect fighting with intellect. Emotions battling emotions, mind fighting mind. Wrestling fitfully with a bummer of a feeling and losing.

Here’s what I’ve learned about getting unstuck: to break through the heavy feeling, you need to understand three things, and I promise each of these is useful on its own, even if you never get to my conclusion.

First, how to tell when you’re genuinely shifting your state versus just avoiding the work. Second, what the heavy feeling actually is. And third, why most of us keep looking for the answer in the wrong place. These three insights stack on each other, but they’re also each worth knowing independently. By the end, you’ll see how they point to something specific about breaking through, but we’ll build to that.

Change your state, don’t avoid it

I see two options when the heavy feeling hits. The first is to do something that changes your state. Go for a run. Hug your dog. Make a lateral move out of the vicious cycle.

This makes the feeling go away. And that sounds like success, right?

But here’s the question worth asking: are you changing your state or avoiding your state?

I had a friend who took a nap whenever he got depressed. He’d get sad, take a nap, wake up feeling fine. All smiles, ready to party. For him, a person whose emotional state was governed by what he was physically doing, that’s all that was needed.

You could also say it wasn’t working. That sometimes it’s good to do the thing that doesn’t go with the grain, like actually talking about what’s happening.

Here’s how to tell the difference: A genuine state change gives you access to something you couldn’t reach before. It creates space for insight or action. Avoidance just kicks the can down the road. You’ll be right back here tomorrow, same feeling, same stuck place.

Your spouse comes in and finds you watching television. “How’s the book coming along?”

“Oh, I’m changing my state.”

The diagnostic question is simple: Does this action create the conditions for me to return to the work differently, or does it just delay the reckoning?

This matters because if you can’t tell the difference, you’ll spin your wheels forever thinking you’re being strategic when you’re actually just running.

And even when you master the art of genuine state changes, even when you can reliably return to your work refreshed, the heavy feeling might still show up. Which tells us something important: it’s not just about your state.

Which means we need to understand what’s actually causing it.

Understanding the gap

Let me tell you what the heavy feeling actually is, because it’s not what most people think.

It’s not writer’s block. It’s not imposter syndrome. It’s not even resistance, though it feels like all of those things.

The heavy feeling is the sensation of standing in a gap, specifically the gap between your expectation and your present experience.

Here’s how it works:

You get inspired. That inspiration crystallizes into an expectation. Maybe it’s writing a novel. Maybe it’s launching a business. Maybe it’s becoming the kind of person who creates consistently. The expectation is luminous. You can see it clearly, almost taste it.

In your mind, achieving The Expectation feels like a hallowed ceremony. Sunlight through an oculus. Magic descending from on high. Or at minimum, a tropical dance party with a balmy breeze and fire in the air.

Then you show up to actually do the work.

And it’s a Tuesday morning. You’re tired. The page is blank. Your coffee is cold. The work feels like Eyes Wide Shut’s Illuminati sex party—everyone else seems to be getting it on while you’re just getting murderously creepy vibes.

The gap between these two experiences, the idealized and the actual, creates the heavy feeling.

This is worth understanding on its own because it means the heavy feeling isn’t a sign you’re failing. It means you’re in the space between who you are and who you’re becoming. Of course it’s heavy, because you’re holding both realities simultaneously.

Every client I work with eventually admits they want to be a bestselling author. But their present reality is: blank page, self-doubt, Tuesday morning. The rift between “bestselling author life” and “struggling to write 500 words life” creates that pressure on your chest.

It’s only natural to want to avoid that feeling. But even if you sit there and open to the feeling, that won’t make it go away.

Knowing this doesn’t automatically free you. Most people understand the gap exists and still can’t move through it. Which brings us to the third thing you need to understand.

The external solution trap

Most people stay trapped because they expect the answer to come from outside them.

Our mental models for inspiration and the muse usually arrive in the form of something external. Lightning striking. The perfect environment. The right mood. Enough time. Better circumstances. Someone believing in us.

We wait for conditions to improve. We wait to feel ready. We wait for the heavy feeling to lift before we begin.

“If I just had more time...” “That person has something I can never have.”

It’s the ass end of the often-studied idea about how we’re all motivated by emotions yet believe we’re rational beings. Emotional triggers trail behind them a ghastly mess of false logic.

This is what makes the heavy feeling so persistent. You’re standing in the gap between expectation and reality, and you’re waiting for external circumstances to shift before you move. But external circumstances changing is another form of expectation, which just widens the gap.

The heavy feeling intensifies because you’re fighting yourself. Mind versus mind. Emotion versus emotion. You battle with it and wait until you’re worn out enough to get the message that proves your fear right.

There’s this teaching, maybe you’ve heard a version of it, about universal compassion and forgiveness. The teacher speaks beautifully about extending grace to all beings, about how everyone deserves understanding. The students nod along, feeling enlightened. Then one guy raises his hand: “Yes, yes, compassion for everyone. But surely not my neighbor, right? He’s a really bad guy.”

We’re all for universal principles until it comes to that one person, that one situation, that one creative block that feels uniquely insurmountable.

The pattern is universal, but we believe our situation is the exception.

We believe everyone else has access to something we don’t. Some secret ingredient. Some advantage. And if we just found that external thing, the gap would close and the heavy feeling would lift.

But external solutions can’t close an internal gap.

So if changing your state doesn’t resolve it, and external rescue won’t come, how do you actually break through?

Breakthrough

The cavalry isn’t coming to save you from the beauty of your dreams.

Here’s what breaks through the heavy feeling: forward momentum. Get your ass out there and practice.

You can’t become a bestselling author unless you author something. The only way you’ll author anything good is if you pour love into the process, which can be joyful and insurmountably difficult.

The multiplier is to have some sunlight in your heart. Drop the expectations for lightning to strike and show up fully for the process. Pour love into your actions until you have nothing else left and nothing else matters.

And here’s the key point: forward momentum isn’t valuable because it closes the gap between your goals and your current reality. It’s valuable because it changes your relationship to the gap. Yes, when you decide to show up and work anyway, you’re going to make some objective progress toward your goal. But that’s just the external stuff. What matters more is what’s happening inside.

When you’re stuck, you’re treating the gap as a problem to solve before you can begin. The gap will forever be the barrier. It will stay with you even when you attain your external goal. Unless you find a way to love yourself and find joy within it, the heavy feeling will always be able to show up and get in the way of your work.

Forward momentum flips this. You move inside the gap. You discover that the gap is a space you can inhabit while moving. The joy isn’t waiting on the other side of the gap. The joy is there in taking action following the initial impulse. The journey itself gives you the fuel to take one step and then another step.

This is why you have to lower the bar—not because your output doesn’t matter, but because lowering the bar is what allows you to start. And only starting creates momentum. And only momentum changes your relationship to the gap and allows you to reconnect with the joy of the process.

The heavy feeling doesn’t disappear. But it stops being a barrier. It evolves from “I can’t move” into “I’m in the space between who I am and who I’m becoming. There’s no wind, but my sails are open all the same, and I am rowing in the direction of my choosing.”

The breakthrough is cumulative. It’s one step and then another. It’s discovering that you’re not kept from joy and love no matter where you happen to be.

I write about this stuff because externalizing it is helpful for me to do. It thingifies it. It’s also fun to make light of what is in fact a really beefy thing to master.

But understanding the heavy feeling and actually moving through it are different things. That’s where coaching comes in.

I work with writers who are done waiting for perfect conditions and ready to build forward momentum. We work together for a month, a few months, or ongoingly, until the gap becomes a space you can inhabit instead of a barrier that stops you.

If that’s where you are, reach out.

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The Understory

The Understory is a place to share works-in-progress. If you have something you’re working on, feel free to post it as a comment or in the chat. You can just click to leave a comment and paste it there. Say a bit about it if you’d like.

Here’s mine for this week. Just some jots. Scenes and images:

under a clothesline
a woman scoots a terracotta pot without flowers

dripping wet sun
siena smoke and exhaust
sunset over ochre

mosquito of a speeding scooter
thick mule of a passing bus

pre-memory outburst
she tripped, spraypainted
kicked gravel

/

for as long as he can and
for as long as he can

walk over the earth
where his grave might have been
to press forward a sort of plow

just a means of opening earth at the seams
of a footstep

soles on brown cypress needles
rustle of a bed

avoiding ants
one bears a cotton tuft
large white sail
peace flag

/

she’s a
white mare at midnight
thigh high in tall grass by the farmhouse
where something happened
a secret had happened
or it didn’t happen
a secret carried away
a story told later

dryflies about
an orchestra rehearses
withered bow drags across
flat strings this hot day
your skin a sponge being squeezed

If you have something you’d like to contribute, feel free to do so! Just click comment and drop it there — or post it via chat. Fame and glory await you.