My Self Doubt is a cheerful, overweight alcoholic version of me with a cute smile and an air of confidence that makes it easy to believe every word she says. She loves to remind me what I cannot do, and she’s full of opinions about what the future is bound to look like. She moonlights as a realist and masquerades as a friend who only wants to save me from embarrassment, but it’s hard to tell where her honesty ends and the hopelessness begins.
Some days I listen to her.
“It’s impossible,” she says matter-of-factly, pouring herself another glass of her current drink of choice. “No matter how much you want something, that doesn’t make it possible.”
In that, she’s right. But it’s important to remember where she’s wrong.
“You’ll never finish a novel yourself, of course,” she reminds me. “It’s a pipe dream. Most people who say they want to write a book never actually do it.”
I wave a copy of my published novel in her face and she just shrugs. But she’s quiet for a while, and the silence resonates with hope. She may always be here, but she’s not always right, and sometimes, just sometimes, I can shut her up. Perhaps she was the voice Van Gogh was referring to when he said that “if you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.”
Just doing it is the name of the game here. I don’t know if it’s this industry particularly, new businesses in general, or just endeavors that people say are never going to work out.
The trouble is that I cannot rid myself of Self Doubt. She goes where I go. So even on the days when I proverbially “just do it,” that is not, in fact, all I have to do. I have to load her up and carry her on my shoulders every step, while she spouts sensible, disheartening thoughts the whole way and does shots while saying “I told you so!” every time I mess up or hit a roadblock. She makes every step doubly exhausting.
Most days, I’m just not strong enough to carry both her and the weight of the next task in front of me. It’s probably best that the medication I take doesn’t allow me to drink with her.
Anyway, that may explain my pattern. I go for weeks without making a move, her noisy litany of depression the constant soundtrack to which I do my day job, ignore chores, or lie on the couch in defeat. But then, suddenly, a day comes when I don’t necessarily have the energy to move forward; I just do it. I don’t feel like I can, but I’m curious to find out. I load her up, negativity and all, and make several brave strides onward and upward into the unknown. And when I set her down, I proudly motion to all the progress we’ve just made.
She can’t pretend she’s not impressed. “But can you do that again?” she immediately counters. “You can’t imagine how many more of those it’s going to take to get to the top.”
I ask her what “the top” means, and she’s got a few miserable ideas about that, too. But I need to rest before I can carry her any farther. I just lie down in a spot where I can survey my progress and turn my back to her while I wait for the energy to return.
I don’t know if one day she’ll weigh less (and based on what I hear from any artist who’s made it, I’m going to guess not) or if I’ll just have enough ammunition to shut her up for longer periods of time, and maybe a system for moving her long distances. I wonder whether the fans I could one day have will help me carry her, or if I’ll then have to carry them, too. I’m guessing there will be days of each. Best to just focus on the next step ahead of me.
“You’ve already sunk so much of your life into this,” she’s been slurring at me lately. “You’ve paid crazy amounts of money to have an editor look at your books, hire cover designers, set up and run your website, and all of the little expenses here and there that you like to pretend don’t add up. You’re like one of those people on Kitchen Nightmares who decide over drinks one afternoon that they’d like to have a restaurant and then end up in danger of losing their house because they don’t know what it takes to run one!”
“Any new business starts off as basically a labor of love,” I tell her. “You have to give a lot before it starts to give back. And anyway, I do know that if you want to do a thing right, it’s going to be an investment. It’s better than doing it poorly just to have it done and create a bad reputation you’ll later have to dig your way out of.”
She mutters, “You have an expensive hobby,” but temporarily leaves me alone.
She’s back at it the very next day, like Lucy hanging over Linus’s piano while he plays.
“And when do you suppose this little hobby of yours is going to start paying back?” she asks. She’s wearing way too much lipstick, I notice. She looks like a hooker. “Even if everyone you knew bought a copy, it wouldn’t be enough to recoup what you’ve put into editing the damn thing!”
“Don’t swear at me,” I answer crisply, trying to look busy. Swearing is a privilege I reserve for more deserving occasions than this. “And anyway, I don’t know that. All I do know is that I have to do the next thing, and then the next thing.” I try to remember the full Martin Luther King, Jr. quote about not being able to see the whole staircase, but she’s quicker than me.
“Certainly.” She lights a cigarette, another nasty habit she manages to look glamorous doing. “And by the time that happens, you’ll be fifty, deeply entrenched in your career,” by ‘career,’ she means my day job, “and oh, probably married to an ordinary man who comes nowhere near any of your dreams for yourself, chasing after a bunch of noisy kids so you can’t finish a thought, let alone a chapter-”
“Can you limit your annoying tirades to one insecurity at a time, please?” I say. I’m not even sure where she got all the husband stuff. I’ll have to put a pin in that and deal with it later in a late-night journaling session. “Anyway, I can only do the next right thing.”
“Well, you’re going to have to do them faster,” she quips, settling herself more firmly on my desk. She flicks one of the dozens of lists and notes I have all over. “Goodness, you’re disorganized! You’ll need a personality transplant if you think you’re ever going to be producing a Stephen King-level output.”
I shove her hand away. “Nobody produces like Stephen King. And I’m not trying to be him.” I hug my laptop protectively as I walk away, but she follows me.
“Have you ever considered the fact that even if some famous person took notice of your work and it got enough people to buy your work that you could quit your day job, you would still owe all of your success to them? I mean, it’s funny – you’re so against having to rely on someone else to support your career, and it would’ve happened anyway! It sounds like you won’t be able to make a living unless you rely on somebody letting you ride on their coattails.”
I shrug. “Guess I’ll have to somehow find success on my own merit.”
She laughs and takes another long drag on the cigarette. “Darling, haven’t you noticed it’s only about twenty authors who take up shelf space in all of the bookstores? They’re not even all good; they’ve just got the right connections. You’ll never make a place among them.”
I smile. “The industry is changing. Those pillars are coming down. And it’s about damn time. I don’t know what the future will look like, but all I can do is produce what I love and hope that one day it pays off.”
She guffaws. “Hope, eh? And if it doesn’t? You should really explore my image of your future. It’s an interesting read!”
“Maybe some other time,” I mutter. “Maybe in therapy.”
She laughs even louder this time. “Darling, the day you dare to open yourself up to a therapist more than once is the day that I become an Olympic gymnast. One glance into your mind, and they’ll have you trussed up like Hannibal Lecter. Or better yet, that’ll be the kind of therapist you get.”
I shrug. “He wasn’t an idiot. Maybe he’d help!” Of course I’m kidding, but sometimes she shuts up if I scandalize her enough.
She sniffs. “More likely than not, the only thing any therapist will find is that you’re a perfectly ordinary girl with ambitions far above her abilities and dreams that a much better person wouldn’t deserve, who likes to romanticize her pathetic life to make it seem interesting. You think you’re one of the budding greats, when all you’ll really be is a watered-down shadow of your least impressive ideas, with delusions of grandeur and no real talents to speak of, who lives off the accolades of people who either loved or pitied her!”
She steps on one of my paintings on her way past.
Sometimes I don’t have the heart to write even when she’s silent because I’m just too sad.
But I always have to recover eventually just to spite her. I tune her out and just do what I do because I love it. She can be white noise if she insists on making herself heard.
Sometimes she insists on accusing me of not working hard enough for the dreams she so disdains. “You could’ve probably had all of those things by now if you weren’t so lazy!” she says, standing behind the massive pile of laundry on my bed. “I don’t know, dear. Maybe you’ve missed your window. You spent so long letting people tell you you were a Smart Kid, and now you don’t think you have to try at anything! So you give up as soon as something gets hard. And guess what? Now you’re not good at anything. You don’t deserve a house because you can barely take care of an apartment, and you don’t deserve a husband when you can’t even make a friend. It’s just that simple! And as for your fiction, you’re a writer who doesn’t even write!”
“And that’s where you’re wrong.” I beam at her and gesture toward this article. “Because in the time it’s taken you to chew me up and spit me out for not writing, I’ve been writing about you.”
She sputters, trying to come up with a response, but I tune her out once more.
No, I haven’t written my fiction in an embarrassing amount of time, but maybe I’ve made progress just by giving her a face and a name.
Maybe in carrying her up this one step, she’ll be easier to carry up the next one.
