When everything falls apart, your deep yes is the only thing left worth holding.
Estimated reading time: 10 minutes
Table Of Contents
I had a video that captured the essence of a live recording session. The execution of our performances was spot on. It legitimized us not only as a rhythm section but also showcased our abilities as individual artists. But the author of the track refused the release of the video.
I had to pull it. Gone. Just like that.
Not because it wasn’t good.
Not because of failure. Because someone else backed out.
This wasn’t just a lost opportunity, it short-circuited everything I’d built into that moment. A reminder that no matter how much time you pour in, you don’t control the outcome.
The hours spent on the recording process, mixing, and video editing are essentially wasted.
I was livid. And rattled. Another in a long line of roadblocks and delays.
How do you respond to the obstacles, no’s, and resistance to your vision?
What do you get to keep when it feels like the world is conspiring against you? What do you hold onto when the work disappears?
Your deep yes. That’s the crux. It is yours, your fortress.
And if you don’t know what it is, or worse, if you’re not protecting it, then when the floor drops out, you’ve got nothing.
This is not about disappointment. Instead, this is about what survives when the visible work disappears. And why clinging to your deep yes is not optional, it is survival.
When Your Deep Yes Gets Tested
“If you are using outcomes that are out of your control as fuel for your work, it’s inevitable that you will burn out. Because it’s not fuel you can replenish, and it’s not fuel that burns without a residue.”
Godin, Seth. The Practice: Shipping Creative Work (pp. 62-63). (Function). Kindle Edition.
You used the outcome as fuel. So did I.
It’s easy to say we’re in it for the process until the result gets yanked and we’re left staring at nothing. That’s when the tests become real.
So what now? This is where most creators quietly exit. They let the setbacks rewrite the whole story. But if the work only makes sense when it “works out,” it was never rooted in anything tangible.
The world is going to stand against you; depend on it. Your deep yes has to be stronger than someone else’s decision or the arbitrary nature of life.
Buster Keaton
The first time I saw Buster Keaton, he was shuffling across the screen in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a 1966 musical farce loaded with Roman chaos and slapstick gags. He played Erronius, a half-blind old man cursed to walk the seven hills of Rome searching for his lost children. Every time he entered the frame, he moved like a wind-up toy unraveling, awkward, mechanical, and hilarious.
Keaton’s timing was perfect. His body language was a punchline in itself. There was something else going on there, like the man knew something the rest of the cast didn’t. Like the mask had seen things.
Buster Keaton wasn’t just a comic actor; he was one of the foundational minds of cinema.
Buster Keaton was a genius, one of the silent era’s most inventive minds. He didn’t just act; he designed the shots, choreographed the chaos, and engineered the impossible. He did his own stunts. No wires. No doubles. Just raw precision and pain.
Films like The General, Sherlock Jr., and Steamboat Bill, Jr. weren’t cute period pieces, they were masterpieces of timing, structure, and physical risk.
In 1928, under pressure, Keaton signed with MGM, against the advice of Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin. He lost creative control almost overnight. No more directing. No more autonomy. He was handed scripts, assigned directors, and told to follow studio rules.
The results were a disaster. Buster’s voice was smothered, and his acclaim began to fade.
This led to a spiral of alcoholism, then a divorce, and a breakdown. After being temporarily institutionalized, the floor dropped completely.
Keaton’s Deep Yes
But here’s the part that matters:
On his rebound, He didn’t stop working. Keaton starred in Le Roi des Champs‑Élysées (translates to The King of the Champs‑Élysées) in France and also had leading roles in English films. He wrote gags for other comedians. Took bit parts in B-movies. Appeared in commercials and on stage. Slowly, quietly, he rebuilt.
Decades later, critics rediscovered his early films and finally recognized him as one of cinema’s founding architects. He was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1959. But by then, he had already done the work of survival.
Buster Keaton didn’t overcome his loss of prestige because the system brought him back. He survived because even when stripped of fame, credit, and platform, he never let go of the work.
The Real Obstacle Is The Mind
“To achieve renewal we need to understand what prevents renewal. And most of the things that prevent it are to be found in the mind rather than in external arrangements.”
Gardner, John W.. Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society [First Edition] (p. 57). (Function). Kindle Edition.
It’s easy to point at the loss: The pulled video, the gig that fell through, rejection after rejection, the project that died on the table. Those are clean villains, you can name them, blame them, replay the moment the plug was pulled.
That’s not what keeps you from moving again.
What stops you is almost silent, yet it is embedded into your psyche. It’s the voice that says, ‘What’s the point?’
The collapse is replayed until it becomes the whole story. You tie your worth, as an artist, your personal worth to an outcome you can’t get back.
That’s where most people stall, where the rubber meets the road. Not in the blow itself, but in the loop afterward.
After a creative collapse, the blow is in the wreckage that follows in the aftermath.
First comes the grief over wasted effort. All those hours, the planning, the energy, and you can’t invoice the universe for it.
Then there’s the fear of rerunning the same track, wondering if the next project will end up in the same ditch. Sometimes, the train wrecks seem cyclical.
And underneath it all sits your ego, the need for legitimacy, public proof that the work mattered. Without it, you start to question if you matter.
Buster Keaton had to face all three. When MGM stripped his control, he didn’t get to reclaim the throne. The industry didn’t hand back his crown. Renewal for him wasn’t about getting famous again; it was about rebuilding without the expectation of a parade.
He learned to create without the applause.
The pivot wasn’t external, but mental.
That’s where the tangible reset starts.
The Invisible Yes – Vivian Maier
Vivian Maier carried a Rolleiflex camera the way most people carry a wallet, always close, always ready. Chicago was her studio without walls. She wandered its streets, slipping through alleyways, riding buses, ducking into laundromats, freezing moments the rest of the city walked past: a boy lingering in a doorway, a woman wrapped in fur, a man sleeping on a park bench. No posing or retakes, life unfolding, caught in mid-breath.
She was born in New York, but her childhood was interspersed, part American, part European, with long stretches spent in France before returning to the U.S. in the early ’50s.
Photography became her obsession almost by accident, a practice she sharpened by roaming big-city streets with a camera and a watchful eye.
By the mid-1950s, she settled in Chicago and made her living as a nanny. The job gave her stability, but never defined her. Every spare hour she could claim went into walking the city, shooting roll after roll. She told no one. Her photographs, tens of thousands of them, stayed hidden in boxes, alongside undeveloped film, audio recordings, and the odd souvenirs she couldn’t resist collecting.
She became impoverished late in life. Former children she had cared for stepped in, paying her rent and helping her get by. But one of her storage lockers slipped through her hands. Its contents were auctioned off without fanfare until the buyers realized what they’d found.
The Treasure Of The Deep Yes
Inside was an unseen world: over 100,000 images capturing the grit, humor, and humanity of 20th-century urban America. Critics would later call the work extraordinary, placing her among the greats of street photography. The fact that she never exhibited her work made it all the more staggering.
Maier’s deep yes wasn’t conditional. She didn’t need a gallery, a book deal, or even the promise of being remembered. She created in complete isolation from outcome, the work existing for its own sake. Nothing to reclaim, nothing to “renew,” because she’d never surrendered it in the first place.
There is courage in Maier’s work. Could you keep working through and sacrificing, knowing no one would see your work?
The Shedding – Ego and Transformation
Something has to die before something more substantial can live. That is the cost of keeping your deep yes alive. You can’t carry your wreckage with you. The part of you that needs the win, legitamicy, and applause, those things need to be buried. What’s left is stripped down, tougher, and still in the fight.
We look back and see how our journey defined us. Along the way, part of us must die so that we can continue to grow. Shedding old cells is essential for the growth of our bodies, and shedding old ideas and beliefs is essential for the growth of our consciousness.
McCrae, James. Sh#t Your Ego Says: Strategies to Overthrow Your Ego and Become the Hero of Your Story (p. 16). (Function). Kindle Edition.
You lost something. But in the refuse of your loss you found a clarity only failure can deliver.
Keaton shed his identity as a star to survive as a craftsman.
Maier shed everything external by default and her craft still mattered.
Both proved the same truth: survival of the deep yes requires letting part of yourself go.
Be honest with yourself: What needs to die in you for the deep yes to live?
The Deep Yes – Creation as Healing
Let the deep yes become your compass, not the outcome.
Over and over again, this is the only thing that keeps me moving when the map burns, the signs vanish, and there’s no applause at the end of the road.
“We don’t make art because we have perfect lives or immense privilege.
We create in order to live through the lives that have revealed themselves
through us, because of, in spite of, the chaos, the confusion, the grief, the
anger, the overwhelm, the terror, the trauma, the tragedy, the feeling of
powerlessness. We cannot control much of what happens to us in our lives, but if creativity is our default processing response, our ability to heal and transform is enabled.”
– Lucy H. Pearce, Creatrix: She Who Makes
What’s fueling you right now, praise, results, likes?
If all of it vanished tomorrow, would you still create?
When the floor drops out, what you’re holding onto tells the truth about who you are.
Can We Help You?
How do you still create when there is no audience, no recognition, or reward?
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