So it happened: I missed a week of writing, and then it stretched into almost two. And my internal critic is not happy. She’s having a hissy fit about how unreliable I am, how I blathered on about the virtues of writing even just 15 minutes a day, and then I failed to follow through.
Never mind that I’ve been coughing up my lungs for 2 weeks: The internal critic is a No Excuses type, sort of like the nun who terrorized my entire 5thgrade class by rattling more than one of our heads against the hooks in the cloak room. (For the record, I’ve known some nuns who were simply wonderful; she was not one of them.)
The critic likes to lay it on thick. See, you’re not REALLY a writer, she crows. That’s what I’ve said all along. I’m right; you’re WRONG. What a fraud you are! Look, if you can’t even keep a simple promise to put in 15 minutes a day, you should probably quit your job helping other people write.
She can go on in this vein for quite some time. When I was younger, her tactics could knock me flat for days. I spent a lot of time at the therapist’s office asking if the path I had chosen was the right one for me. But as I grew used to her tricks, I learned to look for the holes in her logic.
And this time the hole is an oldie but a goodie: The False Dilemma. According to the inner critic, there are only two ways of being: If I write every single day, I am a writer; if I fail to write every day (for whatever reason), I am a fraud.
Like many charlatans who set out two options as your only choices, she oversimplifies the situation grossly. What if an emergency happens? Or I’m too sick to think straight? Should I really believe a voice that thinks I should be writing under those circumstances?
The critic’s draconian words are designed to make me feel like I should give up. And that’s how I know she’s the fraud, because you should never trust an voice–internal or external–that tells you to stop creating.