Be Nicer To Yourself, 2023 edition

Updating something I said elsewhere

Write

You Need To Be Nicer To Yourself (2023 edition)

Welcome back to the Writers Secret Weapon. This is the newsletter for people looking for writing and creative advice that isn’t something they’ve seen a thousand other times in a million other places.

Hi I’m John and it’s my job and passion to help you write better. Everything I do is reader supported, so if you’re liking what you’re reading, consider subscribing. A small monthly subscription helps me make more things to help you write better.

Today I’ve got something a little old and a little new. I’m digging back through my archives and updating something, because old-me was on the right trail, but current-me, I think, can say it better. So today I present to you:

Being nice to myself is really hard for me.

I don’t know really when it started. It’s not like it’s an anniversary I celebrate, the day I started thinking I was so bad at everything and was never going to be good enough for anything good to happen to me.

Maybe it was when I started realizing I wasn’t big or strong or healthy like the other kids. Maybe it was when the depression showed up. Maybe it was when the plan for how my life was told how it was going to be suddenly got derailed.

I’m not sure it matters specifically anymore when it started. It matters way more to me that I’ve been absolutely terrible to myself for at least twenty-four years.

And I know I’m not alone in being my worst critic or my most vocal opposition or my own worst enemy. Maybe you’re like that too. Maybe you’re doing it right now while you’re reading this. Maybe you’ll do it two seconds after you’re done.

We’re not alone in letting our most critical voices savage us, and it’s time we talk about it.

The Slot Machine In The Uncontrollable Casino

None of us, not you and not me and not the random people on the internet, know how today is going to go. We don’t know if today’s the day you start, work on, or finish your book. We don’t know if today’s the day the supervolcanoes erupt. We don’t know if today is the day someone leaves you a one-star review

Today could be the day you get signed to a huge deal. Today could be the day you get any number of rejections. None of us know what today holds in store or how we’ll get through it until we’re showing up and doing all the things we need to get through today.

We can’t control what happens. We can influence a part of it, we can affect the world around us, but we can’t control it. This, I think, is what leads us to find something to control, something we can do something about. Because we’re already feeling vulnerable, squishy, and emotional, we decide we’re going to control how we feel about our creative work.

Which makes sense. We’re in charge of what we do and what we don’t do. But what we’re not in charge of is how it goes out into the world away from us and gets received. We don’t know what other people think, we can’t make them think one specific thing about us and our work and worse, we don’t know what they’re going to think or say or do after they engage with our work.

This is where the fear kicks in. The fear of rejection. The fear of failure.

It’s a gamble. It’s a pull of a lever in an emotion and thought casino. We don’t know what will happen, and that lack of comfort which would otherwise come from knowledge or control scares the hell out of us.

And just like any casino, the positive payouts are few and far between, so we see (and focus on) more losses and things falling short. And we come to identify more with those “not-good-enough” (whatever that means) things and we get used to hearing more no than yes.

There’s more fuel for the negative because there’s more evidence of the negative, or so we tell ourselves when we fire up whatever your critical voice sounds like. When those vicious chainsaws of doubt start firing up to cut us down, we’re so used to the sounds we don’t even think about the consequences of our creative deforestation.

The Calls Are Coming From Inside The House

Whether you’re hacking away at the last sentence you wrote or you’re staring at your paycheck wondering why you didn’t pay attention that one day years ago in school because that one day was when someone gave the exact piece of knowledge that would change the trajectory of your whole life so you wouldn’t be stuck wherever you’re stuck, we are our own worst critics because if we attack ourselves it won’t hurt so much when other people “inevitably” do it. We pre-empt the pain their words and responses will cause by hurting ourselves first. We’re already bruised, so we see nothing wrong with one more.

Except that it hurts to be attacked no matter who does it.

And we have no way of knowing if anyone else will attack or not. It’s 50–50 chance that something good or bad will happen in every experience, so they’re just as likely to say something not-negative as they are to say something negative. Yes, this does boil a lot of things down to a postive-negative binary, and a lot of the world and a lot of things in adn around creativity can’t be boiled down that way, but that’s not changing the fact that the future could be either positive or negative.

Attacking ourselves over every choice or not-choice, every sentence, every setback, every everything is painful way to go through life. Especially when life is already hard enough and full of things we’ll never control.

You don’t have to toggle on your shittiest David Attenborough. You might be used to doing it. You might not even be aware you’re doing it because it seems like it’s always going. But you don’t have to let that voice narrate through your day looking for reasons to roast or skewer you.

Here now we see the writer, seated at their desk, laptop open, writing a sentence about a character having coffee and rewriting it four times as if upon this sentence the fate of all existence hangs. It doesn’t, because it’s a sentence about a made up person having made up coffee, but this writer is so sure they’re bad at writing and that they’ve written a not-good-very-stupid-thing-that-no-one-will-like-and-they’ll-never-be-published-or-they’ll-never-make-a-living-as-a-writer so they’ll delete and rewrite “Charlie sipped his coffee,” two or three more times before moving on.

This is stupid. We do this all the time, and it’s still stupid.

All Pains, No Gains

Why do we do it? Why, when it takes the same amount of time and brain electricity to have a positive thought as it is a negative one, do we pick the negative one and believe it while being really quick to dismiss the positive one?

Is it because we lack evidence? We can point to our rejection letters, our poor sales, our unhappiness creatively as tangible proof of what isn’t good about us but we don’t have anything positive to point at.

But every word on the page that wasn’t there before is a victory.

Is it because the number of things that could be taken as failure far outnumbers the number of things we see as positive?

But having too narrow a scope for success makes it harder to achieve and sets an unrealistic unreasonable expectation for our performance.

There’s an unrealistic set of expectations creatives (particularly writers, but it shows up in artists and performers too) adopt about how things should be or how they should be done or what their behavior should or shouldn’t be. We’ll talk about that specifically next week, but for now let’s skip forward to what happens when those expectations aren’t met - we get negative.

Why?

Let’s follow the train of thought forward. You’re writing whatever you’re writing, you’re absolutely certain what you’re doing isn’t any good — so why are you still writing it?

Why keep doing something you’re so categorically bad at that you keep telling yourself every sentence or paragraph is a problem? Do you do that with things in your life that aren’t writing?

Maybe you call yourself a glutton for punishment. Maybe you tell yourself that you don’t deserve the success you want because you’ve never succeeded like that before and it’s just a dream and it’s been your dream for a while and dreams coming true is nonsense that we tell kids so they have hope before capitalism juices it out of them.

Maybe you tell yourself that the praise and validation from success needs to come from other people in order “to count” or that you feel silly and stupid saying to yourself that you did a good job.

Or maybe feelings aren’t something you normally let yourself feel so anything that’s particularly good and pleasurable makes you feel uncomfortable because you’re inexperienced with it.

All these things are rationalizations, self-written permission slips to keep attacking yourself and making it okay to do more of it in the future because it’s easier or familiar or you don’t see an immediate reward because brain chemicals seem abstract to you.

But it all comes back to that train of thought: if you’re so bad at it, why are you punishing yourself, torturing yourself, to keep doing it?

Here’s my radical thought: I think you’re scared to be good at it because you don’t know what to do.

You’re allowed to be good at things. Not because someone else says so. Not because numbers go up on a screen. Not because you need to be perfect to have someone love you. You’re allowed to be good at things because you practice them and you’re serious about improving and you’re doing things in ways that push you do them better today than you did yesterday. You’re allowed to be more than just a collection of past and future failures. Give yourself that permission. Let that be okay. I know someone out there right now is saying that doing that doesn’t help you get words on the page or it doesn’t fix a story problem you’re having, but it does help you accept and remember that however you fix that problem and whatever words you write are fine right now, and can always be dealt with later assuming they even need handling later.

Meet The Next Steps, Same As The Old Steps

You need to be nicer to yourself. Yes, even if something like praising yourself or doing daily affirmations feels stupid or pointless. You deserve to be nicer to yourself not because of what you did, because of who you are.

You’re existing on a planet that’s dying when the socially elite of one species possibly destroys its civilizations because of a series of made-up beliefs and created hierarchies.

You’re an artist, charged and responsible for putting your voice out into the world. You have visions and views on things, you’re the storyteller around the campfire, you’re the sage who lenses the world and shares ideas.

What you do, when you don’t know what else to do, is write.

Writers write. It’s the same thing you did yesterday, it’ll be the same thing you do tomorrow.

It’s completely okay to be afraid about how your work, whatever it is, will fare when it leaves you. It’s okay to be scared that no one will like it, or that someone will, or that one single person who you really want to like won’t or anything else.

Fear is normal. Fear is part of the creative process. And you’ll have to let your want to put your voice out there in the world reach a greater urgency than your fear to not be hurt or rejected or let down.

Fear gets hungry, you don’t have to feed it though

Fear is the fuel feeding your inner critic. You can’t eliminate fear, but you can certainly stop stockpiling fuel for the inner critic. Too many writers lose too much of themselves and too much time trying to create some kind of mental framework that eliminates fear outright before they can write. They’re really setting up some impossible expectations under the guise of thinking what they’re doing isn’t giving into the fear (by not working), but trying to make an end-around to defeat it.

The point is to accept that you can’t defeat it. It doesn’t need defeating. It needs accepting. It’s part of you, this part that fears success or failure or rejection or the unknown.

Sure, you might get rejected. Maybe more than once. Is that going to stop you? Do you want to let that stop you? You might also get a positive response. Don’t dismiss that 50–50 chance.

It’s not silly to be nice to yourself. It’s not wrong. Or awkward. Or cringe. Or stupid.

Here’s my challenge to you: set a timer, let’s say for 5 minutes. Spend those 5 minutes doing whatever you normally do, but pay attention to what you’re thinking. Just count the number of times you’re a dick to yourself.

Try it also for longer stretches of time, working your way up to all day.

The number of times (especially if you keep count on paper) may be a surprise. It was for me.

Then try to catch yourself being a dick again. When you do (you’ve been doing it for a long time, it’s probably a pretty unconscious habit at this point), stop, breathe, and disagree with yourself out loud before getting back to whatever you were doing.

Example: You’re writing a sentence and you’re pretty sure it’s a shit sentence and you tell yourself you’re sucking because not every sentence is coming out perfect on the first try.

Stop. Breathe. Then say, “No [INSERT YOUR NAME HERE], the sentence doesn’t need to be perfect, it seems clear enough to me, I did a good job writing it, I’m going to keep writing.” (or whatever sounds like you)

Yes, out loud. Yes, this is going to feel silly. Yes, you’re trying to reverse a habit you’ve been doing every day for however long. Yes, that’s going to take time and it won’t be perfectly done the first, the tenth, or the thousandth time. Just like writing.

There’s no benefit to being mean to yourself. There’s no benefit to an overly aggressive critical voice (even if you swear you’re doing it so when other people do it it won’t be a shock), but there is a benefit to you being nicer to yourself — you feel better.

And when you feel better, you approach everything you do with a better attitude. A better attitude gives you a better outlook, which can be motivating, especially when you’re afraid.

Writers write, even when they’re afraid of what’ll happen when they do. It’s dangerous to go alone, better to take a supportive voice with you than a critical one.

Before I go, tell me about your self-criticism. What drives it? How long have you been doing it? When does it seem to get louder? Are there ever times you don’t notice it? Leave a comment down below.

Love you. Talk soon.