The Secret Projects Nobody Will Ever See Are the Ones Saving My Sanity

Somewhere on my laptop there's a folder called 'DO NOT OPEN' — which, I realize, sounds either deeply dramatic or mildly suspicious. But it's neither. It's just where I keep the stuff that's mine. Not mine-as-in-for-my-brand or mine-as-in-I'll-share-this-eventually. Mine as in: this is for no one but me, and that's the whole point.

There are playlists in there that I built at 2 a.m. for moods I don't have names for. Drafts that started as articles and turned into something I'd call prose-adjacent-therapy. Journal entries that are embarrassingly raw. A few half-finished short stories I wrote just to see if I still could. None of it is polished. None of it is performing. None of it is trying to be anything other than what it is.

And it's some of the best work I've ever made.

What Happens When You Remove the Audience

Here's the thing about creating for visibility — even when you love what you're making, part of your brain is running a parallel process. You're writing the caption in your head while you're still finishing the piece. You're imagining the comment section before the thing even exists. That's not a character flaw. It's just what happens when you've trained yourself to think of your work as content.

But when there's zero chance of anyone seeing something? That mental process just... stops. There's no optimizing for reception because there is no reception. You're not building toward a reaction. You're just building.

I noticed this most clearly with journaling. For years I kept a journal that felt performative in a way I couldn't fully articulate — like even though no one was reading it, I was writing as if someone might. The entries were a little too coherent. A little too wrapped up. When I started keeping a second, uglier journal — one where I gave myself explicit permission to be incoherent — the difference was immediate. The thinking got messier, yes, but also truer. Things came out that I hadn't consciously known I was sitting with.

Visibility, even hypothetical visibility, shapes what we make.

The Playlist No One Hears

I want to talk about private playlists for a second, because I think they're one of the most underrated forms of creative expression we have access to. Curating a playlist is an art — you're building an emotional arc, making decisions about tension and release, choosing what belongs next to what. It's genuinely compositional work.

But most of us build playlists with the share button already in mind. We're thinking about how it'll land, what it says about our taste, whether it's cool or too basic or too niche.

My private playlists are none of those things. They're chaotic and contradictory and embarrassing in the best way. There's one that goes from Joni Mitchell to a mid-2000s pop song I'm not ready to admit I still love to something completely ambient and wordless. It makes no sense as a shareable playlist. It makes complete sense as a document of how I actually feel.

That playlist is more authentically me than almost anything I've put out publicly. And it will never leave that folder.

The Draft That Taught Me Something

A few months ago I started writing something that I knew from the first paragraph wasn't going to be published. I'm not even sure what genre it was — part essay, part fiction, part just rambling into a void. I kept going anyway.

About halfway through, I hit something. A sentence that articulated a feeling I'd been circling for probably two years. I stopped and just sat with it for a minute, because it was exactly right in a way that surprised me.

That sentence ended up informing something I did publish, eventually. Not directly — I didn't lift it wholesale. But the clarity I found in that private draft unlocked a way of thinking that made the public work better. The unpublished thing fed the published thing.

This is the part people miss when they think of private creative work as somehow lesser or wasteful. It's not a dead end. It's a laboratory.

Protecting the Space That Has No Purpose

We're living in a moment where creative work is expected to justify itself almost immediately. If you're making something, the implicit question is always: and then what? What's the plan, what's the platform, what's the audience, what's the monetization strategy?

Keeping a private creative practice is, in some ways, a small act of resistance against that. It's insisting that some things get to exist without a plan. Without a destination. Without having to earn their right to take up space.

That's not indulgent. That's necessary.

Because if every single thing you make is filtered through the question of how it'll be received, you will eventually start only making things that you already know will be received well. And that's the slow death of anything genuinely interesting.

Give Yourself the Folder

I'm not suggesting you stop sharing your work. Sharing is good. Connection through creative work is one of the best things there is. But I do think most of us who create publicly could benefit from having a space that exists completely outside of that dynamic.

Call it a folder. Call it a journal. Call it a sketchbook or a voice memo folder or a private playlist or a Google Doc you've never shown anyone. The container doesn't matter.

What matters is that there's somewhere your work can be imperfect, unfinished, weird, and completely unoptimized — and still count. Still be real. Still be worth making.

Some of your most honest creative work is going to happen in the dark. Let it.