Over at Bittersweet Girl's, Profacero said about her now-famous post, "The post was an incantation against the depression of the idea that 'this is so hard' . . . " She said something similar in the original, as well: "I wanted to say these things as an antidote to all the grim repetitions I have seen that you must publish to survive, but that to write is to suffer."
I don't know that I ever got the direct messages she seems to have, but I sure am good at channeling "negative self-talk" (a phrase I dislike, but the distancing effect of which I appreciate). "This is hard, I don't have enough time, I'll never finish, I'm stupid, someone else will do it better, someone else probably already has done it better and I just don't know about it because I'm stupid, the organization isn't working and I don't know how to fix it, I don't dare show a draft to anyone because then they'll know I'm stupid . . . " I expect most of you know that playlist.
Maybe this is my own re-playing of ideas I picked up elsewhere; possibly I could think about that.
What I loved, though, was the incantatory aspect: here's what you play to drown out or better yet, replace, the nasty voices. Affirm the process and your own worth. It's a good way to start the writing day, as I need to go and do now. So I'm going to do a little singing to myself:
Writing is easy and publishing is fun.
1 comment:
It's so funny the way each person internalizes messages. Another way I'm quirky is that I don't say "this is so stupid" when I look at my work. Lots of people do.
I like to give myself license to say, "Hm, this isn't quite how I want it to be yet" because that's license to finish it the way I want to. But I've learned not to say it aloud because people then rush to say, "Don't be so self critical" or "Perfectionism is bad" when what I'm actually doing is giving myself license to write what I really want to write.
(Clearly I am endlessly neurotic.)
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