A Quick Post on Self-Judgement

*These enormous slugs. Disgusting, beautiful, unassuming, and everywhere.*

If self-judgement is alive, it is a pathogen. Risk factors for infection include writing. The exposed words form a nutrient-rich agar for the viral body, which divides and grows from word to paragraph to the whole self. Treatment is haphazard. We manage with uncertain steps. Some say the illness is more autoimmune than pathogenic. Then the blame is upon us.

Creative art always bares the self. We are not our writing, but we are, and when we share a story, we must say to the wide world, “I think this is of value.” Yet it has little practical function we can point to in defense; few objective criteria take reliable measure. It must be, I think, an act of self-faith to expose it all the same, or else great arrogance.

In Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child, the narrator unearths a novel she had written years prior, inspired by her childhood in impoverished southern Italy. The narrator describes rereading her own words, and at one moment finding them facile, contrived, without substance, and on another read seeing them in palpable relief, a real vehicle of feeling. How well I know that feeling.

Sometimes, I have opened up a published book, an acclaimed writer, and I have tried to apply to the sentences I read the lens I habitually wear when I read my own. I am muddying the context of reception to see how the words change: I chain the author’s reputation to a wall. I duct-tape its mouth. I imagine the words are something I have written. And the sentence shrivels at my cruelty. Feeble, it is mumbling, “Please recognize me as important,” with a doubtful smile, supplicant. I nod. I am sorry for the pain I’ve caused. I understand.

*Another sunset. I cannot stop photographing them and I don’t want to stop.*

If we are our own worst critics, who will be our champions? Self-criticism in small doses might refine our work, but to not find in ourselves a way to see the things we write as worthy of the world’s time–such is the greatest failure of all. It is unkindness to ourselves, the body attacking its own organs. That’s my reminder, to myself, and to anyone who needs it today.

Thanks for stopping by, and best wishes for the week ahead,
Jimmy