Facing Your Inner Critic

lizshine74by lizshine74

In A Room Of Your Own, Affirmations, Inspiration, Letters.

Facing Your Inner Critic

I write more letters in February than in any other month of the year, and sometimes that means none at all. Yet, I yearn for the days before email. I want to spend my evening hours, pen in hand, writing on real paper to secure my connections to the human beings I most want to be tied to. My birthday is in February, and I have a close friend whose birthday is just days before mine and who lives on the other side of the country. I often write to her. Plus, Valentine’s day. Some years back, I thought I might convert my entire blog to letters to people and things that somehow related to my creative life. That was fun for a while, but I couldn’t sustain it. I’ve revived one of those blogs here to fuel any of you out there struggling with your inner critic this week.

Letter writing is the last step in the Vitual Retreat I invited you all to join me on this month. I hope you do. I’ve pre-loaded my form, and I will start this Saturday and write two letters of reflection, one to all of you and one to my friend Kefi.

February is a month of pruning the dead branches so that you can grow. It’s a month to face your inner critic head-on so that you can move with power through the rest of the year, the magic of your intentions close at hand. This pruning can be hard work. The following letter is a letter I wrote a while back to my inner critic when she was raging particularly strong. My dream response to this post would be for you to reply with a letter to your inner critic. I love the idea of the collective power of that.

Dear Petunia,

I call you Petunia, though you are just an aspect of me. I call you this because the name reminds me of a girl from elementary school who never once talked to me without that look on her face–eyes narrowed, nose wrinkled in disgust. She was a pretty-faced girl who could be nice, but for some reason didn’t like me.

Petunia, you are just like that girl. No matter what I do, you are there ready to jab your stick pin in my balloon, push me in the lunch line. You tell me that if I think that just because I want to be a writer my writing deserves to be read by anyone else at all, I am delusional, at best a fool playing an elaborate game of pretend.

You tell me to work hard and keep my nose to the ground. You wonder why I waste my time solving problems that involve placing words in order on a page. If I like stories so much, you tell me, I should just read more. There are already more worthy stories out there than I could read in two life times, at least.

You add, in that snotty way you have, that I’m not very good at it anyway. Sure, I’ve struck creative gold a few times, but to a certain extent writing is like sex. If you do it often enough, you’re bound to create something better than yourself.

You don’t like the way I dress or laugh, and you certainly don’t like the way my conflicts aren’t resolved and my scenes too thinly sketched. If you can get my attention, you tell me all this in a steady stream, barely pausing for breath so that my pen stops mid-sentence and I exhale an exasperated sigh, then check my email or do the dishes because who the hell am I kidding anyway?

Petunia, I know this letter won’t bring an end to our relationship. You are an inextricable part of me, and in my optimism, I like to think, a strangely necessary part that keeps me working at becoming a better writer.

Petunia, there is something I want you to know. The most alive I ever feel comes always after writing something I believe is pretty good or maybe even better. That feeling comes from a desire to create far more powerful than your desire to destroy.

I’ve got you where I want you,

Liz

I also work as a writing coach and love helping writers gain confidence, set goals, and develop their work. For more information on coaching, email me at eatyourwords.lizshine@gmail.com.

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.