Not long ago I was at the bank signing a piece of paperwork when the teller looked at my signature and laughed.
“That looks like a doctor’s signature,” she said.
I smiled and replied almost instinctively, “Well, that’s because I am a doctor.”
There was a brief pause. The teller knew me as a teacher. After a moment she chuckled and said something along the lines of, “Right… Dr. Armstrong.” Then the conversation moved on as though it had been a harmless joke.
I repeated myself once more, gently but plainly.
“No, I mean it. I finished my doctorate.”
The moment passed quickly and politely. Nothing about the interaction was unkind. Yet it lingered with me afterward. For years I had quietly imagined that completing my doctorate would mark some visible turning point in my life. I assumed it would matter in ways that could be seen. I imagined doors opening, opportunities appearing, or at least a subtle shift in how others viewed me.
Instead, very little, if anything at all, changed.
My students still call me Mr. Armstrong. My colleagues do the same. The letters after my name have not transformed my résumé into something irresistible. Over the past year I have applied for positions where I believed the degree might carry some weight. In many cases it did not help me land the job. In most cases it did not even help me get into the room to make my case.
For a long time I interpreted that silence as evidence that the work itself had little value. I had quietly assumed that finishing my doctorate would matter to the world in some tangible way. The realization that it largely did not forced me to confront something deeper about how I measure worth.
Psychologists have a name for the feeling that often accompanies moments like this. They call it imposter syndrome: the persistent suspicion that one’s accomplishments are accidental, fragile, or undeserved. Even when the work is finished and the evidence is undeniable, the quiet voice remains. It whispers that the achievement does not truly count.
I have recognized that voice in myself more than once over the past year.
Around the same time these realizations began to surface, I finished reading The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. The book reads like many others I have encountered over the years, books that could easily carry titles like The Zen of Writing or The Zen of Art. Yet Rubin’s message is both simpler and more unsettling than most creative advice. He suggests that creation is not primarily about mastery, recognition, or success. It is simply the act of bringing something into existence.
Once something is made, its meaning no longer belongs to the person who created it.
Reading the book felt, in many ways, like staring into an abyss. Rubin’s ideas forced me to look inward at assumptions I have carried quietly for years. I have always been comfortable describing myself as someone who appreciates art. I read widely, reflect on paintings, and write about the ideas that stir something inside me. But the moment the label shifts toward artist or writer, something inside me hesitates.
Those words feel as though they belong to someone else.
It has always felt safer to describe myself as an aesthete or an enthusiast rather than a creator. An enthusiast can admire without risk. An aesthete can interpret without exposing anything of himself. Creation, however, requires something different. It requires openness. It requires the willingness to place something of yourself into the world without knowing how it will be received.
That uncertainty has always frightened me.
In that sense, Rubin’s ideas intersect directly with the experience of finishing my doctorate. For years I believed the value of that work would be confirmed by the world around me. When that confirmation did not arrive, I assumed the work must somehow be lacking.
But Rubin reframes the entire premise.
The value of a creative act does not belong to the creator. Once the work is finished—a song, a painting, a book, even a dissertation—it leaves the hands of the person who made it. From that moment forward its meaning belongs to the world. Whether the world embraces it, ignores it, or forgets it entirely is beyond the creator’s control.
The creator’s responsibility ends with the act itself.
Seen in that light, my doctorate begins to look less like a credential and more like a creative act. It was years of thought, research, writing, and persistence brought into a single form. I placed that work into the world and quietly expected the world to respond.
Instead, the world carried on exactly as it always does.
At first that felt like indifference. Now it feels more like a lesson.
Much of modern life conditions us to measure worth extrinsically through recognition, promotion, titles, and visible advancement. When those markers fail to appear, it is easy to assume that the work itself has little value. Yet the creative act operates according to a different logic entirely. Its meaning is intrinsic to the act of making.
This realization has changed the way I look at Magritte's Les Fleurs de l’Abîme.
In the image, a small plant grows improbably from the face of a sheer cliff. Beneath it stretches a dark and silent abyss. The flower appears fragile, almost misplaced, as though it should not exist in such a precarious place. Yet there it is, quietly alive at the edge of nothingness.
For a long time I believed that the things I created—whether writing, ideas, or even my dissedtstion—needed the world’s acknowledgment in order to justify their existence. Rubin’s book challenges that assumption. The flower in Magritte’s painting does not grow because the abyss will applaud it. It does not bloom because the valley below will recognize its beauty.
It simply grows.
When I look into the abyss of my own self-doubt, I often see nothing but the abyss looking back. I see the quiet voice that insists I am not truly a creator. I see the suspicion that whatever I produce will fall short of the invisible standards I have constructed in my mind.
For years I believed that voice deserved to be obeyed.
But perhaps the mistake lies in looking into the abyss at all.
When I search for validation from others, when I look outward for some confirmation that the work matters, I find only silence. The abyss offers no reassurance. It does not respond to ambition, titles, or accomplishments.
And while I am staring into that silence, I miss something important.
I miss the flowers.
The flower in Magritte’s painting does not ask the abyss whether it deserves to bloom. Its existence is not justified by recognition. It grows because growth is what living things do.
Perhaps the same is true of the things we create.
A dissertation completed after years of effort. A page written in a journal. A reflection sparked by a painting. These acts may never receive the recognition I imagine they deserve. They may pass quietly through the world, unnoticed.
Yet they exist.
And that must be enough.
The abyss remains vast and silent. It does not promise validation. It does not confirm whether what we create will endure.
But at the edge of that silence, if we stop looking outward long enough, we may begin to notice something else entirely.
Small, improbable signs of growth.
Flowers, blooming quietly beside the abyss.
