How to Stay the Course When You Feel Invisible
6 Ways to Keep Showing Up When the Process Gives You Nothing Back
How the hell do you keep on showing up when results are so meagre that walking away feels like the only sane option?
You are turning up, you are fulfilling something in yourself, and yet, you just have the feeling that no matter how hard you try, the world just won’t budge.
I was asked this question recently by a friend, and I felt her pain immediately.
Why?
Because anyone who has lived a creative life knows the kiss of that abyss. Yet, before you can emerge from it, you will need first to walk headlong into it.
Today’s newsletter is about how we cope when we feel invisible while working on a project — or even as we put our work into the world.
Simply put:
How the hell do you keep faith in the process when it feels like the process is giving you nothing back?
1. The Burning Origin Leaves You in Ashes
Since I started on Substack’s Notes a month ago, I’ve seen a flurry of writers arrive on the platform. It’s exciting to see people inspired by a new platform, and the fire with which people arrive is infectious.
The artists who last aren’t the ones who arrive burning.
They’re the ones who know how to rekindle the fire when it’s been extinguished.
This is not a missive against passion either. Despite all the noise saying that “you don’t need passion, you need a strategy” — you must protect your creative zeal fiercely.
There have been many times in my life when I’ve had to bury deep into myself — to find an energy stronger than the ways the world tried to destroy it.
So I offer this: when you set out, steel yourself in advance.
I’ve come to a point in my artistic journey where I know I haven’t undergone my last breakdown.
But I do know I’ll withstand it.
Not because I’m strong.
But because I’ve watched the process reshape me — again and again — into a more complete version of myself.
And in the end, that person wasn’t forged by fire alone…
But by learning how to rise from the ashes.
2. How Do You Cope With Invisibility?
Once you’ve committed to a path, you realise something quickly — the way forward doesn’t run outward first; it runs inward.
Not only this — but it must.
To create something is to wrestle with your understanding of the world, to venture into unholy silences, to risk yourself in the labyrinth — and to realise, in your lostness, that it has no exit.
In that moment, you are utterly alone with all things — and made luminous by it.
The exit you craved is no longer an option; you realise your journey is not to escape the labyrinth but to map it.
Heeding this brings terror, though.
To create something is to look deeper into the godhead, yet in seeing it, how could you not recoil?
These are some of the emotions an artist goes through after the zeal of early adventure fades.
Fuck, I’m really in this.
The hardest thing about this phase is that it wears two faces.
First, you realise that to discover what you are seeking, you will have to go deeper into the maze.
Second, that there will be no applause, witness or beholder as you do so.
It’s at this point that you understand that your invisibility is not a curse, but rather the very companion you must walk with if you are ever to create the map only you could create.
3. Beware of Wanting it Too Much
This moment of aloneness is tough to deal with — and it’s where I see so many people’s zeal for a project dissipate.
The problem isn’t that they haven’t sensed something in themselves.
It’s that they want too much, too quickly.
You see it on social media all the time.
It shows up in the belief that building an audience will somehow fill the hole we haven’t yet faced.
That’s why so many people get duped by the early organic reach social platforms give new adopters.
It’s how they lock you in — because the dopamine hit of a viral post feels like landfill for all the aloneness and craving for validation we moderns carry.
The trouble is, it tricks people into thinking short-form content is a kind of artistic expression.
And so we chase quick hits — distracting ourselves from the deeper work.
The work where something of value is created, and where the person we’re becoming is shaped.
The paradox?
We turn to social media to cure our invisibility — but it ends up robbing us of it.
Here’s the thing:
You’ll never show up consistently for creative work until you reconcile with the fact that part of the process is living inside the invisibility itself.
It’s not denying you recognition — it’s giving you the space to do the work.
But the lust for validation online steals the time, depth, and evidence that actual audience-building depends on.
The result?
People give up — not just on building an audience, but on doing the work that would’ve built one in the first place.
Because if you need an audience to give you the fire to create, that fire was never really yours.
That’s why invisibility — and showing up through it — are the keys.
Not just to make work that matters.
But to become someone capable of sustaining it.
The paradox is simple:
Wanting something too much is often the very thing that keeps it out of reach.
4. Showing Up Isn’t What You Think
A great reward arrives when you realise:
It’s going to take longer than you thought.
The process can’t be rushed.
You’re willing to do whatever it takes to see it through.
At this point, what we most feared, invisibility, becomes our chief ally.
Rather than lusting after the world and its false accolades, we get on with the business of burrowing into its heart.
What you don’t know in the early part of the process is that showing up is not what happens when you arrive at your creative space.
It is rather about getting to the creative space itself.
The problem nowadays is that we’ve become so results-obsessed, every day gets compressed into a false infatuation with productivity.
People feel good about posting something — but terrible about themselves after a day spent struggling alone on a project.
It feels like the blunt blade of stuckness, simply because no one sees it.
When did we get so fucking afraid of negotiating with the silence?
A dopamine hit rips you out of the dream, right as you’re uncovering its deeper layer.
But that’s where the good stuff is.
When I’m struggling to find the rhythm of a project, I remind myself:
showing up isn’t what happens within the process — it’s the act of showing up for it.
For instance, while writing my new album, I was obliterated by writer’s block. Rather than attempting to get over it, I just kept showing up for it.
Each day before I started, I would sit in the middle of Mahalla — deserted and in the dead of winter — and offer myself over to the creative gods.
I knew that if I showed them over and over who I was, that at some point they would relinquish and give me a song.
It took 12 months. But I got the 12 songs written — and recorded.
5. Trust the Boring Process
The strange thing during our long times of invisibility is that while cut off we have no idea what’s on the other side.
I think of all the times I felt alone and cut off.
So far from the world as if to believe it had already forgotten me.
And yet every time I entered that invisibility, I found the very thing that would pull me out of the darkness I was certain would swallow me.
Here’s the thing:
You don’t get to know life’s plan for you in advance.
You have no idea what’s being composed through you in the act of creation itself.
Yet one thing I’ve learnt is this:
The very moments I felt most separated from life — it was preparing something for me.
Yet to get to that boon, I had had to walk through an absence of light first.
Why?
Because as Joseph Campbell wrote; you enter that forest at the darkest point because no path yet exists there.
The paradox is that the ritual that precedes arrival in the world is almost always — well — boring.
I don’t mean the act of creation itself is boring. But it takes courage to ritualise a process first.
And if you want to reach the world, the safest bet is often the least glamorous one:
To build a boring routine — and within it, invest deeply in your own invisibility.
6. Results Compound
I know that this phase can be incredibly hard — and though I counsel you to have faith within it, I am aware that it is often no compensation.
Yet the point of this essay is this: if you’re in the heart of the struggle — wrestling with impossible odds or working on a project that feels endlessly stalled — I believe, from my life, that you are exactly where you need to be.
Every single chapter that has mattered in my life has emerged after a breakdown, a period of stuckness or a personal unravelling.
These periods were long, invisible — and all I had was the determination to keep showing up.
It was in those stretches that invisibility became my ally, my friend, my guide.
She led me first deeper into myself, then to something I had to create or write — and finally, to the world.
Each time, I believed the latest rupture would be the last.
But it never was.
The next one always came — right on time.
And over the aeon of my life, I began, at the last, to recognise not just the pattern… but its nature.
It came to me as my test.
And it was only once I proved myself worthy of that test that something would shift.
At this point, I feel in the dip.
But I never had such a sense of calm, clarity and quiet knowledge like I did before.
Why?
Because I know that in the Arts — in The Creative Life — things follow their own arc.
You must trust your periods of invisibility.
And you must keep showing up within them.
They mark your chapters.
They prepare you.
And finally, they transform you.
With love,
Jim
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