When I was in college, there was a literary journal called Touchstones. The people who worked on that journal were the essence of awesome. The people who were published in it, even more so. I wanted to get published in that journal so badly, so one day I started writing poetry. It was bad poetry. It was imitations of what other people had published in the journal. But bad imitations. Needless to say, none of them made it in at first. In fact, through ways I cannot even remember, I made it onto the submissions team for that journal one semester, and as we were sitting in someone's living room reading the submissions out loud and deciding what would go in and what was crap, I was mortified to hear one of my poems being read aloud next.
There were quiet laughs. Giggles. Someone even rolled their eyes.
These were anonymous, mind you, which was why anyone on the submissions team was allowed to submit pieces for possible publication. I was stupid and did. I also can't remember what was said about my poor little poem, but it wasn't nice. Brutal honesty. That's a killer sometimes. But, to my credit, I moved forward and kept writing. I enrolled in a poetry class. I started reading poetry more than I ate food. I started to live it, and then something amazing happened! I got better, slowly but surely. I stopped imitating others and started creating my own unique work.
But the point of this story isn't there. It's in what happened afterwards, when I kept writing and kept reading and kept learning and kept growing - all very necessary things! And one day I froze. In fact, I still freeze sometimes. I am paralyzed. I will open a book and see something amazing and I'll choke. I'll turn around to write something new and nothing will come out. All I can think about is the fact that I'm doing something wrong. I should be doing this better or that better.
I swear it's like I'm stuck in that living room listening to the giggles and watching that ETERNAL EYE ROLL over and over and over and over. And it's not even the fact that I'm comparing my work to other people's work, or that I'm afraid of what people think, or that I'm envisioning bad reviews. It's the fact that I'm comparing my work to what it could be. I keep remembering how ignorant I was about how bad I was and I fear that I am bad now and nobody is telling me. Everybody is just patting me on the head and being nice. The only way they would tell me the truth is if I happened to see a brutally honest reaction like I did back in college. (By the way, selling a book and seeing it published did not change these feelings for me in the slightest. In fact, it worsened them, as odd as that may seem.)
But you know what? That poem I wrote back then wasn't so bad. It was what I had written at that point in time. It was a place to begin, and I cannot be ashamed of it. I refuse to be ashamed of it no matter what my subconscious thinks when it paralyzes me. It just seems to me that the more we learn about our craft - about any artistic craft we pursue - the more we see the potential of where our work can go, and that is frightening. The more we travel along our path, the more we can look back and see how far we've come and how "bad we were" at some points and thought we were all that and a bag of chips. It hurts, and quite frankly, it can be terribly embarrassing. There's more to this, but I'm saving it for another post.
If you've felt any of this, how have you pushed past these feelings and kept working? Or do you think you're still stuck sometimes? In my next post I'm going to talk about how I've learned to look forward and push past being paralyzed. It was a hard leap, but I don't regret it in the least.
Find Part 2 here.
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