This week I saw a cartoon that was supposed to be funny. At first I kind of chuckled, but as I thought about the message behind the image and caption I became horrified. It was everything that is wrong with how we treat our creative selves.
I will not post the cartoon itself because it is not mine to share, but allow me to describe it:
A middle-aged man lies on the couch in a counselor’s office. His clothes, a polo shirt and casual pants. are rumpled, his hair sticking out at odd angles, five-o’clock-shadow covers the lower portion of his face. Next to him another middle-aged man sits in a high-backed chair, a notebook and pen in his hand. He’s dressed neatly with a tie and V-neck sweater over a dress shirt. A potted plant sits on the floor below the window, and illegible certificates adorn the wall behind the sitting man.
The picture is clearly supposed to be someone in a counseling session; so far so good. Often the foibles of emotional entanglements can provide fodder for amusement, even if we do our best to be sensitive to the difficulties of others. Then there’s the caption:
I’m a self-publishing author who keeps sending rejection letters to himself.
That! That right there is what is so terrible about how we treat ourselves. How we treat our creativity, our attempts to make something from nothing, our baby steps toward creating and sharing our ideas and images with the world.
We reject our work before we ever even try to share it with someone else. We judge our output, our ideas, to be worthless before they are even fully formed.
Can I just say to each and every one of you - Stop That Shit!
Do not let your mental rejection letters derail your creativity!
Knock off the negativity. Stop the self-talk that tells you you aren’t good enough. Stop sabotaging your efforts before they get off the ground. Stop letting your inner critic silence your creative voice with negative comments.
I think what got to me about this cartoon was that my first impulse was to chuckle ruefully and nod in recognition. “Oh,” I thought, “I know that feeling.”
All I had to do to validate that exact sentiment was to look at the false starts and half-finished manuscripts on my hard drive. In an earlier time I might have had drawers full of unfinished (or at least unsubmitted) manuscripts. We all know the stories of painters and writers whose work was only “discovered” after their deaths, after someone else found those stories or poems buried in a forgotten desk drawer, or paintings stored in a musty attic.
Why not let those stories out into the world?
And those are only the ones we know about. The ones who had someone to champion their work after they were gone. Imagine how many more were never discovered. Or whose work was in a less-easily preserved or stored medium. A clockmaker’s work might last for centuries, even when neglected, but a cakemaker’s? Not so much!
That response made me angry. Angry in the way unearthing the bedrock sexism of my childhood and young adulthood made me angry.
(One example: For years I couldn’t figure out why I was such a bad financial manager that I was struggling to pay my bills, while the men in my same job had houses, and families, and boats. How could they have a boat on what we made? They could do that because it was 1966 and their salaries were three times what I was paid, because I was a naive young woman and nobody talked about how much we made. It was years before I realized how thoroughly we were being exploited.)
Angry in the way that questioning - really questioning - an underlying, foundational belief makes you angry. Having to face the unpleasant truth that something you simply accepted as fact is not can leave you shaking, as this cartoon left me shaking.
Why? Because it brought home to me that I - like so many other creative people - had simply accepted and internalized rejection, had taken on the gatekeeper mentality for my own work, and taken the path of rejecting my creative efforts without even giving myself the chance to succeed.
I was sending mental rejection letters to myself.
There is a silver-lining in this cloud, for me. Just this last week, after the rush of house painting and clean-up, I had a submission deadline for the mystery co-op I recently joined. I had accepted that the painting had eaten my life and I wouldn’t get a new story written, and I didn’t have anything in my inventory that fit the theme of the current issue. I was going to have to miss this one.
But on the day of the deadline I realized there was something, a story long-buried and never submitted anywhere. A story I had rejected and never published, even self-published. It might fit, if I did a little tweaking.
I told myself it was a lost cause. In my memory the story was bad and the writing was worse, and any attempt to fix it would be doomed to failure. I sent myself a mental rejection letter.
Then I threw caution to the wind, decided the editor could choose not to include it, but I had committed to sending a story at least twice a year, and I really shouldn’t blow off this deadline. I might not have a hope in hell of publishing this story, but I could at least let it see the light of day.
I am sure you’ve guessed by now that the story in question is going to see print later this year.
This is issue #12, available for preorder on November 15. Don't worry, I'm sure to remind you when it's out!
The tweaks cleaned up a couple things, brought the story in line with the theme of the issue, and the editor chose to include it.
It’s a small step, but it’s a step. I threw away that mental rejection letter and sent my little creative piece out into the world. I let it be seen.
Years ago I was in a group with several editors. We were discussing submissions, and what did or didn’t “fit” their vision of their magazines. Someone in the group commented that such-and-such wasn’t right for a particular editor. The editor in question turned around and advised the speaker, “Don’t edit my magazine for me. Let me decide what fits and what doesn’t.”
I thought I had taken that advice to heart all those years ago, but I now realize, in my response to this simple cartoon, that I hadn’t. Not really. And I probably haven’t completely taken it in yet. But at least I have been reminded to stop sending myself mental rejection letters.
I hope you have been, too.