3.2. The Language of the Possible
So far, we’ve journeyed a distance of 8 essays to arrive at this point in the arc of The Pursuit Paradox. From desire to disillusionment, from creative momentum to cognitive reinvention, each essay has traced the architecture of creative self-identity. We’ve questioned ambition, deconstructed inherited narratives, and examined how perception sculpts identity through the act of creative interpretation. Now we arrive at the scaffolding that underpins it all: language.
Not merely the language we use outwardly, but the language we speak to ourselves. The inner monologue that directs whether a melody is pursued or abandoned, whether a blank canvas becomes a painting or remains just that. For the creative generalist: the composer, the designer, the writer, the multidisciplinary thinker, language is more than a tool of communication. It is the engine of becoming.
If memory, emotion, and creative process shape the terrain of selfhood, then language is the map. It does not just describe our path; it defines which paths appear to exist. We rarely think of possibility as a language. But the brain does.
In a very literal sense, what we believe we can do, change, become, or express is encoded in the inner lexicon we use to model our sense of reality. These aren’t abstract thoughts. They are structured neural pathways, shaped by repetition, reinforced by metaphor, and embedded within our creative ambitions.
In neuroscience, this is expressed through predictive processing: As we’ve already learned, the brain is not a passive recipient of incoming stimuli, but an active model-builder, constantly forecasting what’s likely or possible. Sensory input only updates those forecasts, it does not author them. Our expectations are central to this. They are shaped by language. Not only spoken language, but the unspoken lexicon of association, memory, and meaning.
Studies in cognitive neuroscience support this framework. Karl Friston’s work on the free-energy principle (2010) describes how the brain minimises surprise by using a hierarchical inference system, continually updating its predictions based on prior beliefs. Andy Clark, in his 2013 article “Whatever Next?”, expands on this by showing how these predictions shape perception and action, effectively framing the brain as a prediction engine, influenced heavily by linguistic and conceptual memories. Additionally this research demonstrates that internal narrative and verbal labelling directly influence both emotional regulation and sensory processing. In other words, what we say to ourselves not only reflects, but also reshapes what we are able to make, feel, and perceive.
Wittgenstein’s concept of “language games” further sharpens this view. Meaning, he argued, is use-dependent. We don’t describe reality with language, we enact it. So when a musician mutters “I can’t catch this groove,” or a designer says “this doesn’t work,” they’re not just lamenting—they’re narrowing their predictive range. Conversely, phrases like “I’m not there yet!” or “there’s something here emerging” expand it. They reintroduce possibility.
This is the silent battle of the creative life: to preserve the language of momentum even when circumstances, or memory try to unwrite it.
Flash of the Past
Just the other day, I was at my workstation waiting for the audio file of a new piece of music I’d been working on to render. I picked up my phone, idly scrolling through social media. That’s when I saw it: a video of someone I hadn’t seen in a few years. Once a collaborator. Once close. Sadly no longer. We’d had a falling out that hasn’t yet found closure. And here they were smiling, performing, and seemingly unburdened. I watched for maybe 10 seconds. That was all it took. Something shifted. Sudden, somatic. Not anger. Not grief. Something quieter but dislocating. The creative flow I’d been in quickly evaporated. The composition I’d been writing suddenly felt foreign. My day’s creative thread had snapped.
Understanding the Hijack
This wasn’t nostalgia. This was cognitive disruption. My brain, encountering a familiar emotional cue, had reactivated the affective state encoded in that past relationship. The amygdala fired. The hippocampus retrieved the catalogue of unresolved tension. The prefrontal cortex, tasked with creative focus, was briefly overruled by the limbic system.
This is known as retrieval-induced affective priming. It’s the mechanism behind sudden creative paralysis: the studio goes silent, the sketchpad closes, the cursor blinks. You haven’t lost skill. You’ve lost internal coherence. But here’s the insight: Memory is just a reconstruction and a signal. And signals can be repurposed.
Naming the Real Threat
It took a few minutes to locate the actual emotion. It wasn’t betrayal. It wasn’t sadness. It was fear. Fear that all the work I’ve done—music composed, essays written, digital systems built—was somehow tenuous. That the self I’ve constructed could be undone by a single unprocessed emotional loop from the past.
That fear, too, was a distortion. The limbic system projects old pain into the forecast. The compostion, the design work, the essays—none of them had changed. Only my access to them had. And access, can be reclaimed.
Relearning Language
Creative work is always interwoven with identity through the process of authentic self-expression. We do not merely make things. We become an newer version of ourselves through the making. So when emotional interference disrupts the process, it does not only pause output, it fractures self-perception. This is the work of self-directed neuroplasticity: the act of consciously interpreting experience in ways that realign the brain’s model of reality. It is not simply resilience. It is authorship and agency.
Some Skills Apply
Hope, imagination, and momentum are not fixed traits. They are cultivated dispositions—skills refined through attention, reframing, and repetition.
To maintain fluency in the language of possibility means learning to focus on what remains open, even when distractions or doubts loom large. It requires the discipline to choose words that invite expansion rather than retreat. Whether you’re developing a new song, iterating on a UX design, or outlining a narrative arc to a story. And it demands a willingness to see uncertainty not as a threat, but as the very substance of creativity itself: the uncarved block, the blank screen, the space where something new might emerge.
No matter the medium, we build what we believe is possible. And we believe, first and foremost, through language.
Beyond Words
Before we close, one final insight. The writer and ethnobotanist Terence McKenna spoke about how psilocybin—the active compound in certain psychedelic mushrooms—can create experiences of a ‘visible language’: a kind of communication that doesn’t rely on spoken words, but instead takes the form of shifting patterns, colours, and rhythmic symbols. In these states, he suggested, meaning isn’t heard or read—it’s directly experienced. It’s something you feel and understand without needing to explain.
Whether through psychedelic states or the intuitive trance of the creative process, when language fails us, the creative act often does not. Music, gesture, light, colour, programming code, these are languages, too. Sometimes, the most potent shifts occur beyond vocabulary. The language of the possible is not always verbal. But it is always there if we are listening though.
Maps and Meanings
So we arrive here, hopefully clearer than before, more fluent in the lexicon of reinvention. The past may return. But what we choose to say to ourselves, through our work, in our creative rituals, will shape what becomes possible. Language is not just a journalistic report. It is a canvas for colouring. Which is where we go next: Cognitive Cartography: the art and science of mapping your own mind.