Too Hot to Handle

It was sweltering hot today. I met a friend for lunch and we noticed that a Pinkberry had opened in the same shopping center. We decided it would be a nice way to cool down. So did everyone else in the Metro area, so we decided to skip it. I ended up spending an hour or so at Barnes and Noble and getting a refreshing Green Tea Frapachino instead.

This weekend didn’t really happen like I planned, but I got my homework done and last night I had a huge break through with The Lost. I have been writing daily again these last two weeks and that has been a break through in/of its self, but I’ve been searching for my original outline to focus the second half of the book. I found the outline on Saturday, yet it didn’t offer any of the plot enlightenment that I was needing. On Saturday night I watched two new babies and after they went to sleep, I finished my homework faster than I expected. With an hour and a half left before the parents came home, I started to work out the bugs and re-outline the rest of the book. Like a woman on fire, I wrote with a fever I hadn’t experienced in a long time with this project. Ten pages later, I feel like I found my inner compass again and I’m ready to head back into the proverbial woods.

I also got into a spat with my mom tonight. We’ve been doing so well lately. I’ve been really trying not get defensive about things or be too sensitive, but tonight I just couldn’t keep it in. I hate fighting with her, but we’re both so stubborn. She thinks she needs to tell me specific, obvious things and it succeeds in making me feel small, stupid and ready to explode. I realized tonight that her need to point out the obvious in the situation tells me on a sub-conscious level that I’m not capable of handling my own life – even the simplest of tasks.

As an artist, hell even as a human being, I struggle with the confidence to believe I am competent and skilled. It hit me like a ton of bricks tonight that this same boxed-in feeling that my mom elicits in these fights, is the same infuriating and suffocating box I inhabit when I allow my inner critic to silence my creativity before it even can come to the page.

I don’t want to blame my mom for this  because I’m not a victim. Now that I’ve made this connection, I can consciously choose to believe this lie about myself or believe the truth – that I am capable of living my life and making my art without the approval or input of my mother or any one else. The irony of it all is how obvious this connection should have been, but it took the same exhausting heated argument I’ve had a million times with my mom to see it. Maybe I did need her to point it out to me – this time.