Apologies to the self-love advocates, but ngl, my inner critic is a sarcastic bitch.

Why is it so hard to do the thing you wish you had more time (or more energy) to do?

That thing is different for each of us, but there's a common string that connects them all. My thing is writing about a subject extremely important to me, but another person's thing could be painting, sewing projects, or creating music.

Maybe yet another person's thing isn't so "traditionally" creative as producing art or creating a tangible object; maybe this person's thing is coding or programming.

No matter what the thing is, it's usually something that we create or tend to (like a garden).

And we KNOW that this thing is important to us. Why else would we think about it all the time?

Like I mentioned earlier, for me, it's writing. When I go days without writing, I'm so unforgiving with myself. "Don't lie and say you're busy. You have the time; you've been scrolling your phone for like an hour. Why aren't you writing? I thought it was important to you. Looks like scrolling is more important to you."

My inner critic is sometimes a sarcastic bitch.

(Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash)

The thing is, despite the online echoes to "love yourself" or to be "gentle with yourself," my sarcastic inner critic is right: writing is important to me, so why do I often struggle to do it? Or when I actually sit down to do it, why does it feel like pulling teeth sometimes to focus on the "important" writing that I know deep down I want to do?

My inner critic is wrong to be so mean, but her overall message isn't wrong.

I know I'm not the only one to feel like this when it comes to their thing. Are you actually too busy to pull out the paint brushes? Or are you on your nth rewatch of your comfort show? (No shade from me! I do the same thing!!)

Lately, I've been hosting Shut Up & Write online writing sessions every weekday morning, and multiple Co-Work & Study livestreams on Twitch. So, I've finally gotten to a point where showing up to do my thing consistently isn't so much the issue anymore; it's the focus and energy to keep the work going.

And then, of course, my sarcastic bitch of an inner critic turns into an imposter syndrome bully since I write about subjects that some people get PhD's in. So naturally, as a college dropout, I always have to fight off the wave of imposter syndrome every time I write a new article.

Depending on how well I can manage my emotions at the time, it's sometimes as simple as waving off my inner critic telling me that a "real" scholar could easily point out all the flaws in my work, or that a "real" writer could criticize my prose as pedantic.

But there are times when I can hear the imaginary critics so loudly that I'm like a deer, frozen still, just watching as negativity pummels me until it surrounds me like a miasma, and I can't get out of it, no matter what I do.

I don't know if you feel the same when you try to do whatever your thing is, and you have a LOUD inner critic, but I find that my body has started developing an extremely inconvenient defense mechanism to avoid hearing her. Before the critic gets too loud, my body starts to get soooooooooo sleepy.

This happens a lot when I'm in the late stages of a first draft, or in the early stages of revisions (the slog in the middle of the publishing process, amirite?).

The intense sleepiness is what I'm fighting right now. I had a goal this morning to finish a draft I'm working on for my website, and looking at it, I could hear the inner critic starting up: "Ugh, what a mess. Too many words, no one wants to read that much, and what you wrote is sloppy anyway."

Well, instead of actually dealing with that bitchy inner critic, I started thinking about how tired I was and how, actually, I didn't get much sleep, and holy shit, it's so hard to keep my eyes open, and have my limbs always been this damn heavy?????

I will give myself credit: I DID come here to blog, instead of scrolling my phone as a way to avoid all the negative shit that comes up when I have a goal of doing my thing, then talking myself out of doing my thing ("I'm too busy" or "I'm too tired") and then shaming myself for not doing said thing.

So, I didn't actually work on my ✨serious✨writing today, but I DID end up doing A thing anyway.

With that said, cheers to showing up to do the thing anyway (whatever that specific thing may be for you!)

Monica