Dear Pepper is an advice-column comic by Liana Finck. If you have questions for Pepper, the advice-giving dog, about how to act in difficult situations, please direct them to dearpepperquestions@gmail.com. Questions may be edited for brevity and clarity.

Dear Pepper,

I write incessantly in my journal. It is easier for me to write my truth than to speak it. I like to imagine that I’m working toward writing a memoir concerning something no one really knows about (so, a confession, an offering of truth).

My worry: Am I really a writer, or is this consuming project just my form of therapy, a desire to show my real self and beg for acceptance and love? If that’s what it is, does it deserve to be read by others? It feels awfully self-serving.

Pepper, thanks for taking the time to try to decipher my question (even that is helpful!).

Kind Regards, J

Dear J,

When I️ do what I️ define as “creative work,” I️ expend about ninety per cent of my energy staving off a terrible queasy feeling—an anhedonic sense of doom—that I’ve been trying to decode. So here goes . . .

It’s a feeling of uncertainty, of not knowing what I’m doing or why, which it sounds like you can relate to. It’s a feeling that I’m wasting time (lately, precious paid-nanny time.) To say that I️ don’t do well with uncertainty is an understatement. A coffee meeting without a definite purpose is enough to throw me into a days-long spiral of dread. In such instances, I forgive myself the dread spiral: I’m a draw-er, not a hanger-outer, and I’m O.K. with that. But when the terrible dread spiral stems from my work—the thing that’s supposed to make me feel safe and happy—I just don’t know what to do. So, on top of the dread spiral itself, I also feel shame.

How’s that for confessional?

To deal with the queasy feeling, I️’ve developed a very small arsenal of two tools that I hope can be helpful to you. My first tool is catharsis: to look straight into the darkness and attempt to define it. I do this by drawing and writing. Are these drawings and writings art? I️’ve learned that I don’t really care. That’s not my particular hangup, though my ability to make a living from them is.

My second tool is to get out of my own head so that the feeling recedes. Over the years, I’ve learned different ways of doing this, from sucking on candies to running to listening to podcasts to going to parties. (I️ dread a coffee date but I️ love a party—it’s such an efficient way of being social.) The ultimate distraction, of course, is children (or in my case, puppies), but I’ll save that for another column.

Even as a practitioner of confessional art myself—am I? Or am I just a letter-reading dog?—I️ can’t definitively answer your question about whether your writing is worthy of being read by others. But I️ can tell you that the feelings you describe are a dragon that stands at the gate of your work, and your task is to figure out how to engage with it: slay it, skirt it, soothe it, or ride it. I think all artists (and probably all people) eventually have to deal with a dragon or two. The point is to handle yours wisely.

Sincerely, sincerely, sincerely, Pepper