Are you as kind to yourself as you could be?

I do love my Terminator arm Bitmoji. You may have noticed a large amount of Terminators in my blog posts and added pages lately. I saw the new one two weeks ago, and I’m going again this weekend, because why the hell not. I’m a Terminator girl from waaaay back in the day when the first one came out. I skipped 4 and 5, after seeing 3 and thinking it was kak. It was. But the best thing about #6 is that it picks up right where Terminator 2: Judgment Day left off (albeit several decades later). It ignores 3, 4, and 5 entirely, and I love that.

The same way I love that Casino Royale pretended that none of the other James Bond films existed. I won’t tell you how many times I’ve seen that movie, but I know it’s over 100. RESEARCH, PEOPLE. I was writing a book about James Bond and I needed to watch it a lot (with a wise-ass friend, and loads of cheap wine and snacks. And martinis, of course, which I never drink unless I’m watching that movie).

I talk about movies a lot because it’s taken me years to get over the guilt I used to feel when I went to one when I had work piled up to my armpits and I was ignoring it spectacularly in favour of whatever was on the screen. As I’ve mentioned before, going to the movies is my reward for getting just about anything done. There are few things I love more. Nothing tops reading for me, of course, but movies are right up there.

So why the guilt? We all live online and we see people doing things they love all the time. I see people in kayaks or hiking mountains, or making glass beads, and I know they’re not doing anything but that in that moment. They’re not working, and they certainly don’t appear to be thinking about work. I wondered for years why I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of doing something that gave me pleasure. And then it dawned on me a couple of years ago.

I dug out an essay I’d written for a conference, as I wanted to tidy it up and submit it somewhere for publication. This is what I saw on page three.

That’s definitely my handwriting. I can blame no one for this but myself. When I read that, I realized what was making me feel such guilt about doing something for pleasure. It’s because I was meaner to myself than I would be to any other person, except maybe Hitler and whatever man can’t hit the bloody bowl in a shared retreat washroom. Those dudes deserve all the shit they get.

I would never ever EVER write this on a writer’s manuscript. Not in a million years would I even entertain the thought of saying that to someone about their writing. Even if it was shit!

Most new writing is shit, and we’re deluding ourselves if we pretend it isn’t. It just is. I am of the “Shitty First Draft” school founded by Anne Lamott, and I also have a PhD in Shitty Second, Third, Fourth, and Eleventy Millionth Drafts. Eventually, it becomes good enough to send out into the world, and perhaps ceases to be shit.

Why do we do this to ourselves? What’s wrong with patting ourselves on the back because we did something (wrote an essay or a book) that most people talk about doing but never do.

If the alleged shitty passage above were written by nearly any other human on the planet, my marginalia would read more along these lines:

Yup. Complete with the smiley face. I’m all about smiley faces.

I’ve written words like this so many times, they’re second nature. It’s my way of inviting the author to think through what the passage means, and to ask themselves whether it’s still mostly in their heads, and not quite on the paper yet. No matter the quality of the writing, I am gentle and encouraging in my edits.

“This is shit” could cause a writer to never set down another word, and I will not be responsible for that. It’s true that not everything I read is good, and it’s also true that a lot of what I read and edit will never be published. But I don’t say that.

I recently turned fifty-five, and while I’m not a resolution kind of gal, I vowed that day that I would enjoy doing things that aren’t work, guilt-free! I also vowed that I would never talk to myself that way again. Either about my writing or anything else in my life.

Our goddaughter is a wise young woman, and when she wasn’t yet even a teenager, I did something wonky and called myself an idiot. She gently said, “You’re not an idiot, Auntie. You made a small error in judgment which has no consequences.” I adopted that, and while I forget it sometimes, if I can say that to myself, I’m good.

I’d invite you to look through your marginalia on your own work. When it’s you being rougher on yourself than you would be on anyone else, erase it, and rewrite your marginalia. Be kind to your work, even if it’s shit, because all new work is shit, and we all deserve kindness.