Everyone needs one project nobody else knows about. It’s the only place your ideas get to be weird without supervision.

An audience edits you before you have finished thinking. Knowing something will be seen pulls it toward what is acceptable, impressive or explainable, and the genuinely odd ideas get filed away as not worth defending. A project with no viewers has no such gravity. Whatever comes out of it is closer to what you actually think.

Start something this month that you promise not to show anyone: a strange playlist, a game nobody asked for, a folder of bad drawings. Give it one hour a week. Judge it only by whether working on it feels like yours, which is a standard nobody else can grade.