Exposing my Inner Critic
Well I haven’t been able to write for a couple of days. That’s because my inner critic has been extremely vocal lately. She has pots and pans and an electric guitar and has made a giant song about how no one cares about me and how I have failed and let everyone down.
So I’m going to expose her right here. Yep. I’m going to say everything she is saying to me.
Want to know what she looks like? She is not my inner child. She is an inner being who is crying and alone and sometimes likes to play and punch and kick. But my inner critic. This is a glitch. This is an amalgamation of trauma wrapped up in a blanket of destruction. This is something that I have to live with. It’s my darkness. It looks like a reptile. Sometimes it is actually helpful and right. Sometimes we work together. (Like right now. It is pleased at being exposed) sometimes we fight and I win. It wants what is best for me but it’s methods are often horrible.
Lately I’ve been having horrible allergies. Which have turned into a sinus infection I’m sure. So now I’m dizzy, tired, can’t breathe through my nose and unable to go to my internship and I feel useless and really upset.
I want to be a good worker. I want my supervisors to think I’m not flaky. I want to be there all the time for my clients and the youth I work with. I want to be known as someone wonderful not a flaky biscuit. I’ve been known as that before and it was extremely embarrassing. My depression took over and I couldn’t go to work for months. I was deathly anxious about working with afterschoolers.
It has happened before and it is happening again. I am filled with anxiety and sadness working with these kids. I don’t know why. I feel like a failure. I feel embarrassed. I feel like an imposter and I feel like everyone knows I am terrible and no one is saying it yet. I feel like everyone is annoyed with me and thinks I’m a know it all and that I’m really too much and they wish I would just go away. This is what my inner lizard says. Based upon the vibes I’m feeling in the space from others. I feel like everyone is over me and wants me to go away. But I always feel like that.
Even in writing I’ve been loathing myself. I see one or two claps or even fifty or sixty or one hundred and my inner critic says “thats nothing.” No one is reading your trash. No one is reading your annoying boring thoughts. You should quit writing because you suck at it and you make the world worse when you write.” Really cruel right? What a mean lizard.
So I have learned this lizard likes to be defeated but he also likes to win. When I do affirmations and take care of my body and eat foods that don’t give me a severe allergic reaction, the lizard feels happy. It mumbles and grumbles here and there but it’s okay. But when I’m fucking up or when things aren’t going its way. The lizard gets loud and angry and has an attitude. Sometimes he starts smoking cigarettes indoors and starts screaming with a raspy Doc Rivers like voice. (Look it up if you don’t know what I’m talking about. That man god love him, sounds like a duck in a hurricane.) My inner lizard is a bad coach. Just like my dad. But I know he loves me. Just like my dad. He’s just doing the best he can. So I’m taking this moment to expose him and his maladaptive lizard pattern to ask for some relief. I am asking my inner lizard dad to let me go and let me write. I am asking my inner lizard to let me wake up later than 6:00 AM and to start my Law and Ethics homework when I am good and ready without guilt. I also am asking him to trust that I’m trying to get a job right now that works with my impossible schedule and that we will be okay soon financially. I’m asking him to work with me and not against me.
He says okay.
For now. Until he forgets and acts on childhood programming again. In which I will expose him again if I remember and don’t fall for his antics.
