The Voice Inside My Head is Being Mean to Me

Dear Cary,

You get a lot of unusual letters so perhaps you will not be shocked to receive one from me. I know you quite well, well enough to know there are many things that you conceal from me. But rather than talk about my problem, as most of your letter writers do, I would rather like to talk about your problem. Or problems. I know you have them. And I am in a privileged position to know about them, and perhaps be of some service to you. For I am, as it were, in your head. Not figuratively but literally.

I have been privy to your many conversations with intimates, therapists, psychiatrists, sponsors, fellow sufferers, friends and family, and I can tell you things about yourself that you may not want to hear. Among these, the one that promises to grant you the most relief from your sufferings, but which may be most difficult to hear, is that for all your professions of humility and caring for others, you are still an egotist of the first order, and this egotism is what causes you the suffering you so often complain about.

Do you remember when you first visited a psychotherapist—only because you were working for a healthcare organization and had good medical insurance? You went there because while doing this day job you were also in the final years of your freelance writing career, and you were paralyzed over a certain relationship with a certain editor at a certain well-known New York magazine whose audience was young male hipsters. You came to this therapist—Gary was his name, Gary something-or-other—and you told him that you felt paralyzed in this relationship with the editor, that every time you started to pick up the phone to call him about the story you had been assigned, you were seized with panic and would begin pacing the room, unable to “pick up the phone” (this was in the 1980s when phones were plugged into the wall and to make a call you literally had to “pick up the phone”).

You began a course of brief therapy with this, the first of many therapists who would attempt to be helpful to you over the next 30 years. What emerged from those sessions helped you a great deal. You were brought to realize through his careful questioning that although your father was a kind and loving man, you lived in fear of his judgment when it came to the quality of your writing, because he himself was a fierce critic of others. You lived in fear that that same fierce criticism might one day be leveled against you, and this would be an event that subconsciously you viewed as unsurvivable, one of those existential threats we live with because we have allowed our deep self-concept to merge with some less-deep, external fixation or idea or doppelganger. Through the use of cognitive therapy techniques you were able to make concrete the reality that you were a writer, that you could write, and that you needn’t pay attention to that terrifying voice in your head that was telling you that you were a failure, that you could not write, that it was hopeless to even try.

That was, as I say, many years ago, and I was there of course, because I have always been with you even when you disregard me or profess that I do not exist. And I am with you now, to tell you that your fear of sending your writing out for publication is based in that same ego-based nonsense, and that it should be easier than ever for you to let that fear go because you are no longer competing with others for attention or money, that you are finally in a position to write and publish for the sheer joy of it.

But–and this is the vexing reality–you seem to have lost that joy along the way! Remember when you were a teenager, just touching the magic? Just glimpsing the authority and wonder of the world’s brilliant writing? Remember when you didn’t care at all if “New York publishers” paid attention to your work, feeling in your happy egotism and ignorance that you were doing what you wanted to do and would find your own way? Remember how cocksure you were that you had unique visions and that they would one day be recognized? What happened to that? What happened to your rather heroic sense of contempt for the commercial world and its many philistine restrictions on the art of writing?

You had to survive, that’s what happened. You had to learn to write for an audience of editors. You learned to meet their requirements. You learned to fake it. You have been faking it for a long time. Now that the survival need for faking has diminished, you are in pain because you do not seem to be able to summon that youthful cocksureness again. You are trying to regain the joy of the amateur, the beginner, the one who has the courage of not knowing!

Meanwhile, you have been writing in your workshops for years, creating worlds, creating characters and situations and strains of lyric and yet you have been afraid to send your work out because of this artificial fear. And though you have not been primarily working on your craft in these workshops, as, being somewhat impatient and having a short attention span, the realm of “literary craft” bores you and you don’t like to spend much time on it. Nevertheless, I mean, your “craft” has improved tremendously just through the weekly and sometimes daily application of attention. I mean, you’ve gotten much better just through doing it all the time.

But let me try to explain where I think this artificial and pointless fear comes from. It goes back to those first sessions with that therapist named Gary. It is your fear of what others will think of you. It is your fear of being judged. It probably originated in your fear of being judged by your father but now it has metastasized into a fear of judgment by anyone who holds the decision-making power at a publication, or who is a revered figure in the world of literature, or even a respected figure, or even a figure who for idiotic and inexplicable reasons receives the respect of others, even though he or she herself has never displayed a capacity for genius or creativity.

You are letting these people walk all over you, prostrating yourself before them, and it is dawning on you now that you know at least as much as they do, that you are doing a rare and rarified thing in your creative writing, and that there is no harm in simply hurling out these missiles of word-craft over the boundaries of culture and country to see where they land and what they engender.

I note with approval that you have recently begun to revisit some scenes in your life in which you suffered humiliation or rejection for your creative efforts. Some of those things happened because you unwisely went onstage drunk. Drinking is known to induce unwarranted confidence in the unprepared. You were manifestly unprepared and yet you went onstage anyway, embarrassing your cohort and bringing humiliation upon yourself. OK. That’s done. It’s in the past. You don’t do that anymore. You have become a careful, even consummate, rehearser. You have taken great pains to make sure that when you appear before an audience, you are ready. But you must not lose the courage to take risks. In your writing, you have done many pieces that are in one way or another incomplete, but you have realized that you are never going to finish them and so have decided to hurl them out into the world and see what happens.

I applaud that. I applaud your recognition that you do not have the stamina or the interest or the perfectionist temperament to “perfect” many of the prose and lyric writings that you have stored on your computer, from the many sessions in your Amherst Writers and Artists workshops.

Speaking of which workshops, I know that you are sad about the passing away of your mentor and friend Pat Schneider, who created the Amherst method. And I know you would like to do something to demonstrate the debt you feel to her, and your desire to continue the lessons of the method and those she imparted personally through her mentorship and example. One of those lessons is to be honest about one’s strengths and weaknesses, and find the courage to reveal oneself through one’s creative work. So you must, at this stage of your life, reveal yourself in your strangeness, your incompleteness, your otherworldliness.

So there you have it. I was sort of glad to hear that you had no letters from actual people this week, and so were going to allow me to put you in the chair for once. I hope I have not been unkind. I do not think I have been any more unkind than you are to others who entrust you with their truths. In fact, I would say that you have been for the most part very kind to people who lay bare their problems and fears, while reserving your savage and severe criticism mostly for yourself. To your own detriment. It is time to be as kind to yourself as you would be to a stranger in need. And it is time to let go of your egotistical belief that you know when a piece of writing is ready and you know what others will think of it.

You do not know. You are the least cognizant of your own faults, your own strengths and weaknesses, your own genius and your own stupidity, which you own in equal measure, in my view.

So have at it, my friend, myself! have at it! Free yourself of this obsessive concern with what others might think! They do not know you, and even if they did, it wouldn’t matter what they think. The writing occurs on its own, not only without your conscious control but often in spite of you.

Have at it! You have wheelbarrows full. Offer it up. See what happens. Forget that voice that immediately chimes in, “I know what will happen: Nothing,” because you do not know that. You do not know the future. You do not know other people. As a matter of literal fact, you know virtually nothing beyond your own nose, which lately has been held at a quite unsustainable altitude, IMHO.

Go for it. Cut the shit. Send your work out.

–The Kind but Stern Voice Inside Your Head