I Can’t: The Critic

The inner critic. We all have one. Some of us have been fortunate to find a sort of balance with ours, but I think we all invariably have moments of feeling like charlatans.

Impostor Syndrome. Fraud police. Different names for the same thing.

For most of my life, my inner critic’s mantra was, “I can’t.” (A very different sort of “I can’t” from last week’s post.)

In my high school theatre days, those words rarely stopped running through my head. The director just told me to do something outside my (incredibly limited) comfort zone? An instant burst of utter terror and a litany of Ican’tIcan’tIcan’tIcan’t.

Somewhere between high school and college, I’d had enough. The self-critical “I can’t” became my lodestone. Any time it fired up, I made a conscious choice to do the thing, whatever it was.

My inner critic doesn’t say that to me any more. I don’t know when she stopped. I only realized when I walked out of a particularly intense audition last year and not heard a single, insidious whisper of, “I can’t.”

She’s still there. Writing conventions are fraught with feelings of unworthiness – of Impostor Syndrome. She creeps in any time I consider sharing a piece with my critique group. I recently made steps to set up a writing workshop with high school kids. Hitting “send” on the email was stupidly nerve-wracking.

But my inner critic no longer dictates to me, and that alone is magic.

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