Embracing the Voices of Doubt...Around the Throat

I’ve been trying to write a book for 3 years now. I have no shortage of ideas nor dearth of failed starts. I have an entire folder on my computer which stores each of my attempts to write the Great American Novel. Some are outlines – complete outlines – of a story. Some of them are blank documents with just a title that I thought sounded catchy. Most are just a few paragraphs or even a few pages of ideas haphazardly typed (or handwritten and transcribed) onto the page. I think I’m doing this all wrong.

What has kept me from soldiering on is a chorus of frightful and frightening voices that overpower my own with their judge-y and dismissive words that remind me I’m a fraud.

This is going nowhere.

No one will read this.

If anyone reads this, they’ll know you’re not right in the head.

You can’t do this.

Anne Lamott calls this radio station KFKD. It is the perfect description. When mine gets switched on it’s incredibly startling – like when I turn on the car and someone else has been driving it and suddenly Hosier is screaming through the speakers about taking me to church. To illustrate, I recently had an idea for a book about psychopaths and this is how it all went down.

The concept started with a Tweet and a link to an article “Occupations for Psychopaths” and it proceeded to list the 10 professions with the most psychopaths. That was interesting enough because I knew plenty of people in all 10 of the careers listed. What really caught my attention, though, was a reference and link to a neuroscientist named James Fallon who, in the course of his work, discovered that he was actually a psychopath himself…sort of. I’ll let you Google him if you want more on that. But it got me thinking about psychopathy and genetics and how external factors determine whether a person with psychopathic tendencies becomes adept with a scalpel in surgery or with a switchblade in an alley. I had an idea for a book about twins with the “warrior gene” who were separated at birth and lived completely different lives. But I had to do some research because I know little about genetics and psychology. Well, that turned out to be a very deep rabbit hole into which I unwittingly stumbled. I was actually enjoying my freefall right up to the point when I was reading about genetics and variant alleles on Wikipedia and that’s when someone switched on the radio.

You took Biology for Dummies in college and you barely ever went.

Bless your heart. Do you even remember what an allele is?

Someone else would write this book better.

And in fact someone had. As I learned a few days later while drinking wine with my next door neighbors, someone has actually written my book (or something like it) and he was a Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Genetic Brilliance at the University of F***ing Geniuses. So in just a few months there will be published evidence of my fraud. Five hundred eighty-eight pages of proof for the entire chorus of skeptics in my head.

On the worst days, those voices are not attacking my attempts at writing, they are attacking my character – like a right-wing radio personality who knows my name and all my weaknesses. 

What makes you think you should be doing this instead of cleaning your house? Have you SEEN the pile of dishes in the sink?

You don’t love your dog because you’re writing instead of taking him on a walk. Bad pet parent.

Why haven’t you planned dinner yet? That grocery shopping isn’t going to do itself, you know.

Your kids’ friends’ parents all have real jobs, why don’t you?

These are the voices that stop me cold.

Recently, a confluence of events caused me to question my sanity. First, among the voices of gloom that I regularly encounter there is also a single soft voice repeating this single phrase:

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

See, I’m insane. Clearly, I need to change what I’m doing. But how? I once read about this guy who changed his life by changing the password on his computer. The IT department where he worked required him to change his password every 30 days for security. At first it annoyed him, but then he had an idea. Instead of a word, he would make it an intention or a goal…something he had to type often to remind him of what he was trying to add or subtract from his life. So every 30 days he would make up a new password:

Save4trip@thailand

Quit@smoking4ever

Sleep@before12

Apparently this worked for him most of the time and I thought it was a clever idea. For a couple of seconds. Then I forgot about it, because I don’t work in an office, I work from home. I also furloughed my IT department (Geeksquad) and, at the time, neither had a password on my computer nor knew how to set one.

A few weeks later, I was talking to a friend who had just finished 30 days of yoga on YouTube. It changed her body and she had before/after pics to prove it. Then I saw 3 or 4 people on Facebook who were doing 30-day challenges of one kind or another and this 30-day idea just kept lying there atop my brain, vibrating on the voices of fear and doubt. It wasn't new...Morgan Spurlock pretty much cornered the market on it. Nevertheless, it would not leave me.

Then this past weekend I went to a TEDx event in my city. I’m a TED junkie…which isn’t the worst kind of junkie, but still it keeps me from living my life sometimes. Anyway, I was at this day-long event in which speaker after speaker talked about building things and writing songs and bringing communities together through dance and sending people to college and developing children’s brains and giving people hope…all kinds of big ideas that change people’s lives.

But I still just wanted to change my own, which is selfish but absolutely true.

And then, in between speakers, on a huge projector screen 100x the size of my laptop, they played a TED talk from 2011 by Matt Cutts called Try Something New for 30 Days. It was a 3 minutes and 27 second slow-motion A-HA moment for me. Somehow, hearing it in that room and thinking about it in the company of all those people crystallized its significance for me. Instead of hearing what they did, I finally heard how they did it. They didn’t have fewer obstacles and they didn’t have more passion they just had tenacity. And in that 3 minutes and 27 seconds, I realized that I needed to strengthen my tenacity muscles…in 30-day increments. And while I’m at it, I should blog about it because everyone knows that in 2015, no one has really done anything unless they’ve blogged about it. 

Just one problem.

What will I do about those voices when they start asking the questions? Especially the ones about people not liking what I write…or not reading it at all. It was then that I remembered something about myself…something that I haven’t mentioned yet.

Back when I was doing all that research on psychopaths, I read about something called the Hare Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R) which is a diagnostic tool used by professionals to determine a person’s antisocial or psychopathic tendencies. You can’t take this online…not really, but you can take a watered-down, Cosmo-quiz-style version of it. So I did. And just as Buzzfeed helped me to discern which Friend I am (Phoebe) and which country I should live in (Finland), I now know from a completely trustworthy source (the Interwebs) that I am mildly psychopathic as well. Most psychopathic criminals score above 30, the general population scores below 10. I scored an 18.

Now, I know you’re thinking that I shouldn’t put much stock in this because the test wasn’t administered by a professional and it’s not like there are brain scans to back it up. But I am Phoebe and I should live in Finland so who am I not to embrace this bit of Internet-provided self-discovery as well? There are downsides to it of course…psychopaths have trouble really connecting with people and are often labeled as manipulative but on the upside…psychopaths also don’t really care about either of those things.

That was just the permission I needed. To find out (after 42 years of caring so deeply what other people thought of me that I would change my behavior and even chase dreams that weren’t my own) that I am actually a Honey Badger and I really don’t give a shit.

So this blog will be dedicated to the stuff I do care about. Maybe people will read it and maybe they won’t. Maybe people who do read it will like it and maybe they won’t. And since I’m not a complete psychopath, it might turn out that I care a little…but I doubt it will last long.

First, I’m going to do twelve, 30-day challenges aimed at creating new good habits or eliminating old bad ones.  And I’ll write about them here. Here’s what I’ve come up with in no particular order (except I am giving up sugar first):

1. 30 days without sugar
2. 30 days without TV
3. 30 days of Yoga (at least 30 minutes per day)
4. 30 days without Facebook
5. 30 days of meditation (at least 10 minutes per day)
6. 30 days of no speaking
7. 30 days of reading (at least 1 hour per day)
8. 30 days of no cussing
9. 30 days of good sleep (at least 8 hours per night)
10. 30 days of cleaning (at least one whole room per day)
11. 30 days of running (at least 20 minutes per day)
12. 30 days of writing on a single manuscript (at least 1 hour per day)

     Today is day one with no sugar. I’ve done this before and in my experience this makes me pretty unpleasant to the people around me. It also gives me a headache. I’m fine now…it’s only been about 18 hours…but eventually my unpleasantness will probably be reflected in these blog entries in ways that you may interpret as angry or aggressive. You can share that in the comments if you feel called to do so, but let me remind you that my mild psychopathic tendencies will prevent me from caring.

Oh and a word about the title of this blog. It’s completely unrelated to what I’m writing and its reference to newspapers will one day (too soon) become a historical reference to a dead form of media. Maybe I’ll talk about what it means later…much later.  For now, just know that it’s more about you than it is about me.

Let’s do this.