It’s only Monday and I need to take pen to paper here to contemplate how much of a hot mess my long-form article is.
I sent what I have in to my teacher Aish and honestly what I’ve written is quite embarrassingly bad. This is how all ‘artists’ feel about their work I suppose. Self-critical and full of doubt. I suppose it’s how you wind up hearing about Oscar winners talk about imposter syndrome.
All my life I have written things. Good things, bad things, meh things, moving things. The moment I decide to take it up as more than a hobby I freeze and am a deer caught in the headlights. Why is it that all of a sudden I don’t even know how to write anymore?
The logical side of my brain is telling me to calm the fuck down. It IS the first time I am writing a long-form piece that is in-depth and not from my own perspective. It IS the first time I took interviews and am learning how to work with the material I’ve gathered. It IS the first time in all my life that I am doing this seriously, putting my shoulder into so to speak. I shouldn’t expect myself to be perfect this first attempt or to know what I’m doing right away. That’s insanity! One doesn’t learn how to ride a bike perfectly the first time you get on one.
Yet all those nasty saboteur voices are just lurking beneath the surface trying to tell me I’m not good enough or worthy. I see you nasty gremlins. But I don’t plan on letting you take me down. There’s too much ripping apart in this world already - I mean even books as breath-taking as Where the Crawdads Sing have nasty-ass Amazon reviews. The world will judge my work plenty fine without me judging it first.
So, the plan for now is the same one as the plan for every day really. Tomorrow, I get up, I try to write and edit some more. I rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. Eventually (hopefully by the end of September — yikes I am always pushing out this deadline) I should have a non-shitty piece to share with the world and try to get it published.
This hot mess, will continue to try to make sense of the hot mess she’s made tomorrow.