Coaching My Inner Critic

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.”

― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

As I struggle to produce even the first step per Lamott (a shitty first draft), a friend advises me:  "Lose the inner critic."  My sister teaches creativity workshops in which she strongly encourages her students to "dare to suck."  I was once in an improv jam session with her in which the primary theme, sung and danced with a blues motif, was all about daring to suck.

All the self help books in the world tell you to be aware of the voice of your inner critic so you won't inadvertently censor your every move.  In fact, that's not enough.  I think you have to be acutely aware, and then write down every word verbatim for awhile, every word that nasty little bastard is whispering in your ear. 

"No sense in even starting to write that blog/novel/poem--you know it won't be any good."

"No one will read it"

"You have nothing interesting to say."

"It's a waste of time!"

Then close your eyes and perhaps imagine that a school teacher has said those things to your kid. Now do you feel your talons unsheathing, ready to fight back?

Since the inner critic is really a part of me and probably does have some useful insights, I'm wondering if I can coach him to be more constructive.  If I model the constructive approach for him, next time the negativity sets in, it might go something like this:

My inner critic:  You're just not creative enough to come up with new ideas.

Me:  You know, we need to talk.  You're not helping.

IC:  Hey, it's tough love.  Somebody has to keep you honest.

Me:  All this negative talk just shuts me down creatively and I can't even muster up the guts to suck.

IC:  Well, as I was telling another one of my clients...

Me:  Clients?!  You harangue other people this way too?

IC:  Sure--my genius is relevant everywhere.  This other client is in an African dance class.  She just loves this class and has gotten some compliments about her dancing. At the end of each session, the drummers drum wildly and a dance circle forms where one dancer at a time can prance to the center and show her best moves.  My client would just love to enter the dance circle.  So far I've protected her from making a fool out of herself by sucking. She goes home each week after class sad, but safe and sound, unembarrassed.

 Me:  But she's miserable.  Each week she regrets not having the courage to enter the circle, you bozo!

IC:  Not worth the risk.  She's not perfect, you know.  She'd just disappoint herself and everybody else and we can't have that happen.

Me:  Look, I don't know about the dancer, but I need a change.  From now on, if you can't say something constructive, don't say anything at all.  Otherwise I'm going to switch channels and stop listening to you altogether, got it?

IC:  You're a coward!  You can't take the truth. If you're that sensitive, you'll never get anywhere anyway.

Me:  There you go again!  I'm shutting you down.  Every time you say something negative I'm going to block it, and think of trees instead, since I'm quite fond of trees.  They're beautiful and they produce oxygen, essential for breathing...

IC:  Trees!  What a stupid...

Me:  ...Oak.  Pine.

If:  ...stupid...

Me:  Sycamore.  Sassafras.  Breathe.

IC:

Me:  You know, I'll take constructive criticism...

IC:  You wouldn't know constructive criticism if it bit you in the...mmf.  Bmf.

Me:  Look, since you're part of me, we both have my best interests at heart, right?

IC:  Right, but you don't want your blog to suck, right?

Me:  True.  But right now I'm working on what Anne Lamott calls a "shitty first draft" for my blog. Just getting my ideas down in some form, knowing nobody will ever read it in this form.  It doesn't have to be perfect.  Really.  If you have something helpful to say, I might let you help me edit it later.

IC:   You know you get wordy.

Me:  I know.  We can polish it together.  Later.  Once the first draft is done.

IC:  Okay, if you ever conquer your laziness long enough to finish the boring first dr...   Mmf.  Bmf.

Me:  ....Maple.  Boab.  Eucalyptus.  Ginkgo.  Boojum.  Avoid using words like lazy and boring.

IC:  You said shitty. 

Me:  I'm allowed to call it a shitty first draft--you're not.

IC:  Looks like you've got a good start.  As soon as you finish the first draft, which I'm confident you will, I'm convinced it'll meet your shitty standards and I'll be right here, ready to help.

Me:  Better.   You can do this.  Meanwhile, go tell that other client of yours that she's a beautiful dancer who deserves her spot in the sun, and in the dance circle. 

The Storyteller's Tapestry

It's not often that you can see creativity unfolding and blossoming right before your eyes.  It is even rarer to share this experience with an appreciative audience and to be linked to the creator by blood and history, to have known her since you welcomed her with great excitement into your seven-year old world as your youngest sister.

This was the amazing experience I had on a warm August Saturday in Indianapolis in a small IndyFringe theater, when for the first time I saw my sister Nell perform her new improvisational Story Theater show, "And I Am Not Making This Up."

Each of Nell's shows is different:  true improvisation.  After a few words with the audience, she begins with some movement, seeming to reach out into the cosmos and gather multicolored threads of memory and insight and humor, and then right before our eyes she weaves them into a tapestry that is greater than its parts. She speaks, gestures and flows, telling vivid stories based on her own experiences and often from the childhood that we shared and did not share. (If you have siblings you may know that one child's family experience can vastly differ from another's.)  

She tells of southern Indiana summers, of camp at McCormick's Creek, of her older brother Paul now lost to us, who teased and terrorized her unmercifully as he suffered and battled his own demons, and his final redemption as she finds and holds close a loving memory of him from better days.  She shares this memory:  when Paul died, the two of us went to the funeral home to say goodbye.  With mixed feelings, she touched his cheek.  So cold...as cold as snow, evoking a memory of when she was perhaps five and was on big brother Paul's back on a sled speeding down the steep Dewey Drive hill in Ellettsville...icy snow flying in their faces, a fast, scary ride, the laughing tumble off the sled at the bottom of the hill.  

She plucks these memories from the air, and weaves them together with another story about her first summer camp, the night hikes in the dark Indiana woods as she clings to her counselor and clutches her gigantic flashlight.  Singing camp songs by the creek in the darkness, she imagines a scary maniac, perhaps battling his own demons as he lurks up above in the limestone cliffs and peers down on the tiny campers below.  The singing closes with a hymn Nell humorously hums and mumbles, explaining that she never really went to church and so doesn't know the words. In my separate childhood I did go to church, so I know the hymn:  "Praise God from whom all blessings flow.  Praise him all creatures here below....".  And the maniac up in the cliffs is also redeemed it seems, as he rumbles a rusty A-m-e-n at the end of the song.

Emergence of light from darkness seemed to be a theme in the show I saw:  fear in the darkness for the tiny campers on the night hike clinging to their flashlights but then turning them off as they sit by the creek singing--the imagined fears the darkness generates.  I expected her to tell the tale of the candles set in little boats to float in the darkness down the creek, but she didn't this time.  Fortunately I had already heard that memory from another show she did in a woods years ago, and candles were really floated on the water for that one. 

Later she tells of the fire balloons set off from the deck behind our house into the darkness, and of the black Labrador madly barking his alarm at a flashlight sent up high into the night sky on a kite string by our equally creative and complicated father.

The most extraordinary part of the performance is to see my sister pluck those images from thin air and thread them together with the themes:   darkness and light, loss and redemption. I know she prepares beforehand to get her head into the place it needs to be, to be ready to capture the images on demand on stage, weaving in whatever the audience and ambience might hand her from cell phones ringing to plaintive train whistles in the distance.  It is nothing less than a miracle of creation and in August she did it six times over the course of a week or so. 

From the darkness of the stage Nell shone her light on images and memories I share with her in patchwork patterns, each of us seeing them through different lenses.  Darkness, light, redemption, love, forgiveness.  Classic themes, beautifully told.  It was a privilege to see.