“Dare to Be Awful” Even When You Beg for It to Be Great

Way back, I wrote about the phrase “dare to be awful.” I didn’t coin it (I stumbled across it on a writer’s site), but it stuck with me.

At the time, I didn’t realize how valuable it was for neurodivergent creatives like me, who often live with an “all or nothing” mindset and a desperate need for perfection. When perfect inevitably fails to show up, shame and guilt happily kick off the spiral party.

Here’s the truth: the things in our minds will always feel more magical and majestic than when we drag them into reality. That story, painting, sculpture, or interpretive dance is glowing when it’s only a dream. But once you put heart into it—while juggling life’s interruptions, inertia, and criticism—the shine fades.

That’s where “dare to be awful” comes in. It’s the reminder that what you create won’t be perfect. It might even be terrible. But you have to let it out into the world anyway. Creators are dreadful self-critics because we compare our finished work to limitless daydreams and visions. The motto exists to keep us from endlessly polishing something that will never measure up, or worse, trashing it altogether. (I’ve been guilty of both.)

I’ve long claimed to believe in “dare to be awful,” but I recently realized I’ve been using it wrong.

Take this site. At the start of the year, I had grand ambitions: weekly new release reviews, weekly Movie Breakdown podcasts, serialized fiction, pop culture deep dives, personal essays about being a neurodivergent creative dad, and all sorts of experimental storytelling. But as I wrestled with my diagnosis and tried to revive my freelance career, I kept telling myself: not yet.

Instead, I repurposed social media posts, captioned family photos, and wrote about how I wasn’t writing the things I wanted to write. I dismissed them as “throwaway” pieces that at least kept the site alive. And yet—some of those pieces have connected deeply with readers. A few were heartfelt originals I’m proud of. Still, my pop culture writing has mostly been sitting in time-out.

The truth is, my so-called “dare to be awful” was really just “delay taking a real chance.” I gravitated towards safer pieces, the ones I didn’t pour everything into, because then if they flopped, it didn’t hurt as much. I wasn’t risking heartbreak.

But that’s not what dare to be awful really means.

The real dare is to create the things that scare you—the projects you’ve dreamed about for months or years. The ones you desperately want to be great, because you’ve poured sweat, tears, and pieces of your soul into them. These are the works that feel like they must destroy imposter syndrome once and for all.

And when you finish them? Your inner critic laughs. They don’t look like what you imagined. They seem awful. Maybe the worst thing in the history of history

But you share them anyway. Because that’s the best they’ll ever be, and tomorrow you can make something else. Your inner critic has terrible taste, after all.

Here’s where I admit something: I haven’t really dared to be awful. I’ve been sneaking through the loophole of “this wasn’t meant to be great anyway.” That way, my autistic perfection detector let it pass.

But what is perfection anyway?

When I look back, my most popular and successful pieces were never the ones I thought were destined to soar. They were the messy, personal ones I almost didn’t publish. The ones I thought no one would care about—until they did.

So here’s my new vision for Beyond the Balcony. It isn’t going to be the sleek, Rolling Stone–rivaling pop culture hub I once imagined. It’s going to be a messy, quirky, personal, and imaginative home that reflects the writer behind it.

A place where “dare to be awful” can finally thrive.