Dropping the Mice In: Ridding Ourselves of Critical Voices
Anne Lamott says that what often gets in the way of our writing is all the critical voices we hear each time our fingers touch the keyboards.
What I’ve come to learn as a writer-person is that I first have to quiet my brain enough to even hear the voices. I’m not sure if the cacophony in my brain is because I’m a writer or I’m a writer because of the cacophony. That I even know cacophony should mean something, right?
But even processing that thought is its own noise. Allowing myself— no, more like demanding myself— to stay still is its own torture. I’m not all that special in the lunacy. I live in a society that immerses itself in noise–television, radio, iPods, media bombardment. They’re all ways to avoid keeping company with the one person who is our own Hannibal Lector–ourselves. But stillness is mandatory if writing, at least any prolonged writing, will result.
Some days I go to the keyboard and there’s a convention of strangers with varying degrees of neurotic tendencies all meeting in my brain. So I either write poop or I listen to poop. Either way, it’s tough.
Being my own worst enemy means I can’t get rid of me. But those others? Those I can drop in the mason jar. Anne Lamott says that’s where they belong. Drop those noises in like mice.
And once you see the mice, wriggling in the jar, you come to see how ridiculous it was to grant them all that power. They can’t escape unless you allow them to, and why would you?
