Recognizing the Critic Within
“The mind is its own place and, in itself, can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven.”
The other day, a friend asked me, “Is your play finished?”
Believe me, I have asked myself that same question, if in an alternative way.
“What is my problem?”
"What is taking me so long? Get to it!”
“FIVE YEARS?? Maybe six? Pathetic. Stupid. Just write.”
Etcetera.
This is not a nice voice to live with. Poor Carl. He has listened to me berate myself for decades. The other week he asked me, “Why do you have to talk to yourself like that?”
It wasn’t the first time he has asked me that, but somehow this time I heard his heartbreak. And I realized that it hurts him as much as it does me.
In the same vein, yesterday, when I had decided to give up the play—let it go, it’s hopeless—I took a breath and opened up to what might come instead. It seemed appropriate because it was early morning and still dark out, and I was supposed to be meditating.
I glanced at my self-help/spiritual bookshelf with its Tarot card interpretation books and the I Ching. Andrew Harvey, Sharon Saltzberg, and Peter Kingsley. Marcus Aurelius, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Elaine Pagels. Thich Nhat Hanh, Tyson Yunkaporta, and Sherri Michelle…you get the idea. You’d think I would have it together by now, right? (Hello, Critic.)
My hand chose Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home by Toko-pa Turner. As I skimmed, this phrase stood out:
“The real bravery of dreamwork is…stepping into our adversaries’ shoes to see how we are also the cruelty that victimizes us.”
I’m a slow and arguably dense learner/writer because I write my life in parallel with my characters’. Believe me, none of us follow a straight and narrow path. And then there are those deep ruts that I get stuck in. The good news? Sometimes, after weeks and months, I crawl out of whatever rut I am in and, upon looking back, see how much I and my characters have changed. In other words, my creative process is an arduous, circular counterpoint to my life. A spiral, like the sacred spiral dance of the grouse.
To my heartbreak, there aren’t many grouse left. There are a lot of animals who have come and gone. It’s the same on the island where my characters live: the island is symbolic of America, and my characters want to save it. Just so, I want to do something to rebalance our relationship to the earth, begin the healing. Unfortunately, at the rate I write and given the world’s current situation, I am unlikely to accomplish what I had hoped to with this play. It will be too little, too late.
But maybe … maybe just asking the question, “Can the characters save the island?”, will make the difference because, as I have said before, we’re all connected. How we act matters. What we say and think matters. The movement of a pen on paper, a realization in a mind that, for once, is listening to the heart. These shifts could make a difference in our human path to a new kind of consciousness, a kinder, more compassionate relationship with ourselves and others. And that shift might make all the difference.
Because I know we can save the world. We have the tools. The question is, will we?
My job right now? Not to cause Carl pain by being hypercritical of myself. This isn’t new to me. Frankly, for years I’ve been trying to accept, be kinder, more patient, less critical. It is so much easier to be cruel. And so I focus on my characters. I write to heal my characters who are, in the end, just parts of me. And that work isn’t the work of one day or five or six years.
I told my friend no, I haven’t finished it. Not yet. But some day I will. After all, how dare I give up on being kinder to myself when I want so much to help create a more peaceful world? Not a hell, but a heaven.