i sat with my inner critic…

The past few weeks have been beautiful and simultaneously difficult for me. In general, the last two to three years have been full of ups and downs. I am nowhere where I thought I would be years ago. And I’m grateful about it, excited about it, and also experiencing a lot of grief because of it. But that’s a topic for another day.

What I’ve noticed come up more and more recently is my inner critic. A while ago I struggled immensely with an internal creative block, which I had to ride out (which felt unbearable at first and then proved to be absolutely worth it). I ended up doing nothing for weeks. No pressure to achieve, to create, to be productive. My creative accomplishments were always incredibly interwoven with my own self-worth, so stopping for a while wasn’t easy. Especially in the midst of my attempt to make it all my career and main source of income.

When I noticed my excitement and curiosity for creativity and creating come back, I slowly, very slowly, dipped my toes in the water again. I started learning again instead of pressuring myself to always create. It almost felt like ‘‘create, don’t consume’’ was plastered in my brain. And I agree with the saying. But for some reason, it also doubled the constant pressure I already had within me. The pressure to constantly create, to constantly create output. As someone who already has a tricky relationship with achievement, this saying made a home in my mind and blurred the lines of a healthy balance with creation. Anyways, so I picked up the guitar and piano. I also dabbled in music production and allowed all of my curiosity and interest to flow into music.

But even while channeling all of my energy into these pursuits, one thing never left my brainspace. I was never able to stop thinking about writing. I wanted nothing but to write. And I also wanted to do anything but write.

When I was younger, writing was all I ever thought about. I loved nothing more. I still vividly remember being able to use my mom’s old computer and opening up TextEdit files (it was an Apple laptop) to write. I used to pick out all of these random cute fonts on DaFont and end up writing stories for hours. When I was 11, I had an online blog for children’s stories (which I never published, or maybe I did, but nobody ever saw it). I also tried to convince friends in school to write a book with me, but nobody seemed as excited as I was. I attempted to write stories on Wattpad (that I never finished). And one of my most vivid memories is still being on vacation in Italy, rushing from dinner to the hotel’s shared computer in the lobby just to log into my Google account to keep writing a story. I’m not sure which story it was, but I still remember how eager I was to get back to my story.

Over the past two years, I reconnected to writing more and more. I wrote a few Substack articles, blog posts on my website, and other writings that I was quite proud of. Some might also know that I started writing a novel almost two years ago. It’s still not done. And even though it’s not even close to being finished, hitting the 80k word mark was the hardest thing I had ever done. I haven’t looked at the manuscript in months. I don’t know when I last added to it. The story has made its way into my heart, but a part of me can’t get itself to even open the document. Just reading it all over again makes my skin crawl, although there’s a softness within me when I think about it, too. The story deserves to be told. I’ve grown too close to the characters to abandon them and what they have to say.

But the more I think about writing, the more I don’t write. The more I journal, though, and observe my thought processes (and let me tell you, I’ve done a lot of that in the past five years), the more I peel the onion that is me. Yes, it might be a weird way to describe it. But that’s what the past years have been for me. I notice how many layers there are when you look within. And when I peel off one and notice the root of why I do what I do, I find another layer under that one, too. And so on.

And a big one, a layer I just uncovered in the past few weeks, has been about perfectionism and my inner critic.

I never saw myself as a perfectionist. Not at all. Not even close. During my years as a professional photographer, when I took photos and edited them, I often overlooked details and didn’t see them until later on, when I had already posted them, and someone else pointed it out. I always saw myself as someone who looked at the whole picture, not having the attention span or not even being capable of putting in the effort for something to be perfect. I wouldn’t consider myself a lazy creative. I would also not not consider myself a lazy creative. But when others complained and complained about their perfectionism holding them back, I couldn’t really relate. I definitely had standards in my mind of how I wanted things to be, but they never really held me back too much from expressing and sharing my stuff.

It wasn’t until I examined other areas of my life that I noticed a few weird connections. I wondered why, when walking my dog or being out, I constantly viewed myself from the outside. When a person passed me on the street, I heard their voice in my head, almost the same as mine, telling me that I looked weird, odd, that my outfit was unflattering, or that I looked sickly because I wasn’t wearing any makeup. When I sent out email newsletters and got no replies (which, tbh, I had never gotten any replies), I made up my mind that people must hate me and find me annoying. When I walked around wearing leggings, being sure people could see my cellulite, I made up my mind that they cringed and felt sorry for me behind my back. When I saw a guy outside, even one I thought was cute, I didn’t dare to smile at them. I was sure I was too ugly to even be considered. I would be laughed at; I was sure of it.

I’m not sure if all of this is so normal for me that it never occurred to me that yes, indeed, I was a perfectionist. Maybe perfectionist is not exactly the right word for these examples. But the inner critic, or critic in general, definitely is. Yes, throw the word insecure in there, too (the word shame is also fitting). I believe, though, that they all actually go hand in hand.

When I first observed my thoughts and how I went through life, it felt like I acknowledged wearing tinted glasses I didn’t even know I was wearing. Notice how I didn’t say ‘‘I took off the tinted glasses’’.Well, I wish I could say that, but I’m not entirely there yet. They seem to be glued on for now, connected to my skin. I’m trying to find a proper way to gently remove them. For now, I don’t even really know where my skin and the frames end. It’s almost as if they are a part of me, that’s how long I’ve had them on.

The more I observed, the more sadness I felt. Deep, profound sadness for myself. I felt sad for going through life like this for the past 15 plus years. And the more I noticed it showed up in my day-to-day life, it didn’t take long for me to also notice it within my work and creativity.

And since writing, undoubtedly, always held the most importance in my soul, it made sense that this inner critic showed up here the most too. Don’t get me wrong, it of course also showed up heavily within my photography (which I did professionally for many years). It showed up in my singing and any other creative pursuits too.

But mostly, it finally explained the constant push and pull I experienced within writing. I dreamed of writing freely, but when I sat down, I immediately saw my writing through other people’s eyes. I saw it through the eyes of mean, critical Goodreads reviewers, the talented friend from my past who’s really into fine literature, the people from school, old teachers, and even current friends. Each word I wrote quickly became tainted by the meanest things anyone could possibly ever say about them. It almost felt like I had an audience of people in my brain (well, I did). My brain was full of people I (mostly) didn’t even like. People I was secretly even afraid of. People who made comments about my work in the past. People who I secretly wanted to think of me as cool, above them, unattainable, mysterious.

It made sense why I didn’t want to write more than two paragraphs without quitting. I was scared. I felt ashamed. And on top of that, it felt like i had a million things to prove and a thousand images of myself to uphold and defend. I was, quite frankly, exhausted before I even hit the second sentence on the page. It felt like writing with a gun held to my head.

I’m not sure what exactly happened during that time of observation, but I think the right things find you at the right time. The more I understood that yes, I indeed did struggle immensely with an inner critic, the more I saw it for what it was. The awareness helped a lot. I gave my inner critic names and traced most thoughts of criticism back to specific people from my past, who were mostly people from my time in school. What they said is not much of my business now. But sitting with how it affected me back then is. I now try to envision my younger self in front of me, and I try my best to hold her pain. (I’m still not quite sure how to actually entirely let myself feel emotions without intellectualizing them, though, but that’s ALSO a topic for another day).

And before I knew it, memories of how I created as a child slipped back into my mind. I thought back on what exactly it felt like to be a child without having that inner critic yet. These memories took a while to resurface, but when they did, it almost felt like I could access this state of being in my body more and more.

It was also around that time that I found Geneen Roth’s books. All of her books are about emotional eating, which I found incredibly helpful. But it was something else that helped me on my journey of uncovering and getting to know my inner critic. Geneen’s writing is honest. So honest that I often almost gasped because I couldn’t believe she actually wrote and published certain paragraphs. But this truly did unlock something important within me.

I want to strive for truth. Not for perfectionism.

I’m not sure where my journey will lead me, and I also know there’s a part of me that is very meticulous about my craft (duh). I also want to experience the struggle and effort that comes with making sure something turns out in a way that I would classify as ‘‘perfect.’’ But sure as hell not because of an inner critic. I want to strive for my own kind of perfection when I want to do the original vision and idea in my head justice, and want to visualize it in the best way possible. I want to strive for my own kind of perfection, the standard of perfection I intuitively hold within me, out of love. Not out of shame. I don’t want to strive for their kind of perfection. After seeing past the illusion, it holds no value for me. It does not sustain me.

I’ve spent a lot of time being frustrated with my writing blocks. Why can’t I just sit down and write normally like others? Why does it have to be so emotional and hard? What is wrong with me? But the more I look (at anything, not just this), the more I notice that resistance, emotions, inner blocks, shame, frustration, fear, and many more relating emotions all just want one thing. They want to be looked at. And of course, we spend our lives doing anything but looking at them. We run. We get angry. We think we are broken or wrong. We avoid. But I do believe it is in the moment we start facing what we are running from, that what has seemed so scary or unbearable, actually turns out to be as soft and fragile as the unprocessed emotion we felt after receiving a comment from a 10-year-old mean girl from school. Or we see a sad child, a vision of us when we were younger, that just wants to be told it matters. The beautiful thing, then, is that we finally notice that we actually hold the magic wand in our hands. We now get to change the narrative. We get to transform and transmute, bringing the shadow into the light. And then we might just see that it was exactly what we needed to move forward. We may just notice that our biggest wounds and shadows turn into our biggest gifts.

We may just notice that we never actually strived for perfection. That we actually just created blocks to protect ourselves. And when we get past the illusion and notice that we are stronger than the thing that feels so scary, then we can finally observe and actually tune within us. The us beneath the conditioning and shame. And we can ask ourselves the big questions (had to think about Uncle Iroh here for a sec). What is it that we truly want and strive for?

Is it expression? Is it connection? Is it truth? Is it channeling the divine source of creativity and lovingly manifesting ideas into reality? Is it sharing our work, simply because it is healing to us (and in return also to the world)?

What is it that you truly strive for? You’ll be surprised to see what you find when you hold your inner critic and perfectionist in your arms, tucking them in with a blanket and listening to their sorrows and thoughts as you would to a child, without judgment.

Love, Light & Peace, Amelie ✧