Too Dumb for New York, Too Ugly for L.A.

Book Project Week Two Update

What I learned this week: Maybe it’s time I stop shitting on myself for a sec.

I appreciate self-deprecating humor. I use it a lot. I find it funny. I find it relatable. It’s important to laugh at ourselves and not take ourselves too seriously. And so on and so forth.

And also…often, self-deprecation for me is very closely tied to perfectionism. I’m excellent at finding tiny errors, which makes me a conscientious editor. It also makes me be an asshole to myself. If I go to 47 school plays and recitals, but miss the 48th because I have to work, I beat myself up about that last one. If I get a compliment from a client about a work project I kicked ass on, it takes everything in me not to diminish my work and point out an irrelevant flaw.

It sounds like maybe I’m just really humble, but that’s not it. The truth is a bit more gross.

Plenty of times, I’ve performed false humility to get even more praise (think Frasier Crane). Other times the combination of being an over-achiever with low internal self-worth has made me a pain to work with, because I was so externally motivated that I needed near-constant affirmation.

Finally, I’m just tired of looking at my limitations, failures, and problems and spending most of my time berating myself and trying to get better at the shit I suck at. Improvement and progress are great, blablabla, but I skewed heavily on the side of never investing equal amounts of effort and time into my strengths and natural talents. That is an unfortunate part of perfectionism I didn’t realize until recently. It made me average, because I failed to invest effort into my strengths, letting them wither, and struggled to get better at stuff I sucked at with mediocre success.

I have never tried to just throw everything I have at what I want and am already really good at. This week, I got curious about what that would look like and where it could take me.

What made me want to quit:

• Not liking what I was writing. The temptation to go back to re-read or edit is strong. I had to remind myself frequently: stop judging, just write. Some people enable strike-through in Word, so it’s harder to read what they’ve written. I might try this next week.
• I wasn’t inspired or motivated to write. It was a slog to get my minimum word count down every day. The honeymoon phase is officially over.
• Some of what I wrote brought up a wave of grief, then lingering frustration. It was the first reminder that some writing brings relief and some writing kicks up shit that I have to sit with.

What kept me going:

• Self-compassion. Asking for hugs from Rob when I needed them. Calling an Al-Anon friend for the first time when I was struggling instead of waiting until I was fine. Taking a break from work and going for a walk to get fresh air and smell the pine needles.
• My accountability writing partner Tara. If you don’t have a writing partner, try it out to see if it’s just enough incentive to get you going or keep you going.
• Reading my writing buddy Meghan J. Ward’s travel memoir Lights to Guide Me Home and cheering her on from afar as she presented her book at the 2022 Banff Centre Mountain Film and Book Festival yesterday. It was one of Meghan’s childhood dreams come true and inspires me to think of where I want to go.

Week Two Stats: Finished Chapter 2, wrote 4,395 new words