Critic

For that inner critic who plagues us all. Never allow him/her to keep you down

Life is like a giant book, how you write your story is up to you, and the form in which you choose to deliver your story is especially important because it becomes your legacy. As with any story the author has some sort of guidance, be it by a real person, or by our own Jiminy Cricket. My critic finds its home in the quietest depths of my mind. Like a tick, it spits poison onto to work and infects my mind freedom with deep scars of despair and doubt. Like seeing large amounts of red ink on a test I didn’t study for, or a paper that I rushed through the night before, it causes me to close up and shut down, sealing off my most pure form of expression. It’s like the final boss at the end of Final Fantasy X, it has many forms and each time I defeat one, another finds some way to bring me back down. It grows more powerful each time making it hard for me to keep getting back up, but just like any game there’s a restart button that allows me to start from my last save point or allows me to better equip myself for the oncoming battle. It appears that the more important or dire a piece is, the more my critic wants to see it fail. It causes me to lose hope in my skill as a writer making me doubt that anything I’ve written actually has any value. My best strength I have found is to turn to a piece I wrote years ago when I battling a health issue. As I wrote the piece I poured my most inner thoughts of my “true” self into. I put it away and years later found it when I was cleaning my desk drawers. As I sat down and read the piece I found that it gave me power and restored a certain faith in myself that I had almost all but forgotten. So although my critic and anyone’s may have a lot of power, it can never stop the work of a true writer.