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One without a beginning
Well, it has a beginning, I’ve been working on it for two days, while rowing miles and pacing the house. Consider this a content warning at the top: this one is personal, and I’m using me as the example because I speak most about my experience and I don’t want to presume or guess at yours. You can tell me in the comments if this spoke to you as much as it did to me.
This week, I want to talk about self-doubt.
If you’ve had it forever, do you notice?
I’ve known for my entire life that I was not like other people. This isn’t about the queerness or the interests or the tics or my heart or anything, this goes further back. I was born months early and underweight, a baby with cerebral palsy at a time when that didn’t have a lot of resources. And as my father delighted in telling me growing up, it was by his “kindness” that I never got rods in my legs or walked with crutches. Instead, his kindness put me into hours of painful therapies to (his words) “make me look like everyone else.”
So I had speech therapy to learn how to move my mouth and speak. I spent hours after school standing on balance beams an inch off the ground and stretching my calves until I cried. I held pencils with weights on my wrists so that ultimately I looked like every other kid in school. Except that I was incredibly underweight and so terrified of the world because I kept getting told by doctors that I could get hurt and stay hurt for life.
And I didn’t move like other kids. They could run, scramble up a tree, play tag, hit a ball, go down a slide, and be a kid on a playground. I shuffled. I was afraid I’d fall off the ladder on the slide so it took me forever to get up and go down. I was afraid a lot. Afraid my body would fail and I’d get hurt AND that the kids would make fun of me.
When you know you’re different and told by everyone that you’re always going to be different, is it really self-doubt if you just know that you’re not as good as everyone else? Isn’t that just acceptance? It’s never sat right with me.
To make up for the fact that I couldn’t hold a fork without spinning it like a drumstick (something I still do, it has annoyed many relationships), I figured if my body was going to fail me, my mind wouldn’t. I read dictionaries and encyclopedias and history books alongside my comics. I asked questions any time I felt I could get away with it. I’ve always been proud of what’s in my head, even as it began to swirl more and more with clouds of depression, paranoia, shame, and panic.
But again, not the kid out backyard wrestling with his friends (though they did let me be the referee, which was rad), so I knew I was different and knew other people were just better than me. And self-doubt doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t give a shit if I’m 6 or 46 and if I’m standing by a tetherball I can’t reach or if I’m trying to launch a writing class for $39 a week.
You also can’t think your way out of it. I know a lot. I know a lot about a lot of things, and no amount of knowing the how to play Killing In The Name on a baritone saxophone or the history of English alphabet or remembering the NES code for TMNT 2 (Up, Right, Right, Down, Down, Down, Left, Left, Left, Left, B, A, Start) is going to give me the critical boost to believing that I belong in a space as much as anyone else.
Self-doubt has been my second shadow my whole life. I’ve watched it smother opportunities and successes like a fire blanket and I’ve watched it strangle words in my throat to keep me from trying something until I’ve overthought it and stopped and started dozens of times.
I hate it.
A weed in everyone else’s garden
I think my fervent dislike for it in myself (I always thought that if I did enough drugs I could poison it to death, because getting ridiculously fucked up seemed to mute most of my negativity) led to me wanting to get it out of other people’s thinking.
Clearly my trying to coach and help others is me trying to help myself, to varying degrees of success.
Over the years I’ve been building this theory that there’s a relationship between self-doubt and creativity. The most creative people I know are drowning in doubt, and the people who I wouldn’t want to helping me cross the street are the people who appear to be free of self-doubt. It seems unfair. Surprising no one, I do think capitalism and its reward structures let shitty people prosper, making self-doubt one of those things that keeps people separated by opportunity or availability.
When I see writers and creatives absolutely paralyzed by their doubts that their work isn’t good, that they’re not good, that they’re not going to be good, that they’re dreams are frauds, I don’t see what they see. I don’t see the void or absence of potential, I see the strings and chains of things they’ve told themselves or let others define for them. Because to me, these people are beautifully talented, so full of potential, so capable of doing more than they dream of doing. Sure, they’re not there yet, and it’ll be hard, any good creative process has risks and difficulty because it’s vulnerable and sincere, but they can get there, they can do the thing.
In teaching people how to plant and tend their creative garden, there’s this small unspoken whisper that what’s a weed in their garden is a thorny bramble in mine. I can tear theirs out while cutting my arms up all the time on mine.
I hate it.
Like paper over rocks
Most interesting to me in all this is that despite the self-doubt that I’m not good enough, that other people are better, that I shouldn’t even bother trying, is that when I instead do something, I feel better. Sitting there, teary eyed and self-rejected, not working, is miserable. When I go take the twenty minutes or the hour or however long, I feel better. I get something I can push back against the self-doubt. Sure, I’m not doing a 3 camera interview show on YouTube while shilling 4 courses and my new merch line, but I just got that chapter edited, I just made those graphics … doesn’t that count?
I think we have to learn to let it count. I think we have to let doing stuff, even if it’s not big stuff or the “right” stuff or the stuff everyone else is doing, win this game of rock-paper-scissors between our thoughts and our doubts.
So I’ve come to this conclusion: I’m not a great runner like other people, but in a marathon like writing, just getting one foot closer to your goal matters. Not the stride, not how smoothly you did it, not what you did with your hands. Just progress. Just the next thing to do and the last thing done.
That part I don’t hate.
Thanks for checking out this week’s Writers Secret Weapon, thanks for being here. I hope this gave you something to think about.
If you’re looking for more writer-specific advice, might I suggest heading over to the YouTube channel tomorrow (Tuesday) at 1pm ET for a nice stream all about describing things?
Anything on your mind? Let me know. Love you. Talk soon.