rebeccakuder

5 minutes of inner critic love

graffiti di Venezia, summer 2017
graffiti di Venezia, summer 2017

Dear readers,

Here’s a little something I did with the middle school students this week. I thought you might like it, too.

You can do this exercise as often as you want to. Also, you can take more time with any step if you would like to, but the idea here is that you don’t need a lot of time to have fun & decrease the self-doubt.

Love,
Rebecca

p.s.If you try this, let me know how it goes! And to read more about my work with the inner critic, go here.

**

5 minute Inner Critic exercise
by Rebecca Kuder, M.F.A.

INTRO: What is the inner critic? (Because people sometimes ask.)

It’s fine—and sometimes helpful—to have the part of yourself who edits, who helps make sure you are safe. But we’re dealing with the part that isn’t helpful: that voice that gets in your way, or makes you feel small, or stuck, or makes you doubt yourself. Sometimes my inner critic tells me I’m not good enough. Or says, “Who do you think you are?”

Exercise:

1. Take a piece of paper. 30 seconds: Imagine the inner critic as a character. It could be a ball of cat hair, a building, a monster, whatever—take 30 seconds to draw a picture of the inner critic. Keep drawing for the entire time.

2. 30 seconds: (As you are able) Stand up, close your eyes, do a power pose—WONDER WOMAN is one option (feet shoulder width apart, hands on hips)

3. 4 minutes: Turn the page over: Write a letter: Dear Inner Critic…and keep writing for 4 minutes. You can say anything! You can use bad words! If you run out of things to say, write the words tick tick tick until you think of something else to say. You never have to show anyone this letter unless you want to. At the end, sign your name.

rebeccakuder

Reframing (being open)

Laite Memorial Beach, Camden, ME, August 2018
Laite Memorial Beach, Camden, ME, August 2018
Each week, I email the week’s writing goals to my friend Diane. I’m grateful for this practice, because it helps me focus. (Thank you, Diane!) Today I wrote the following, which I thought I’d post here. I’m reframing a couple of things that have been getting in my way as I work on the memoir about my childhood house, 318.
Goals for this week:
1. Remind myself that I’m doing this for me, not for the publisher whose contest I plan to enter in January. The thought of pleasing someone else has become a huge, anxiety-producing barrier (someone I don’t know, someone who may want something very different from what doing, whose wants I cannot anticipate, etc.), so I am reframing thusly: I am doing this for myself. I need to please myself. It’s not an assignment someone else gave me.
2. I keep repeating “I’m lost” in the writing process. When I talk to people, I say, “I’m lost.” It is how I feel, but saying it again and again seems to be self-fulfilling. It doesn’t feel good to say “I’m lost.” I’m tired of saying I’m lost. It’s not a good kind of lost, like when you’re walking around Venice and you have no idea where you are, but you’re on vacation and there’s a gelato place so you get some melon gelato, let’s say, and it’s so delicious, and you walk a little bit more and you end up somewhere you recognize. This writing-a-memoir-lost is NOT like Venice lost. This lost feels kinda bad. So I realized this morning (as I did the morning pages from The Artist’s Way) that maybe I’m not lost, maybe I’m just OPEN. I have never been much of an outliner in my writing—it’s always been messy and organic. In that way, I’ve always been open. So maybe instead of “lost” I will start saying “open.” Being open feels much better than being lost. Being lost describes a struggle. I want to alleviate the struggle, the powerlessness.
Being open feels much calmer.

I am doing this for myself.

I am open.

rebeccakuder

(#me too) A raw list…

shadow of writer at Long Pond, Omega Institute, October 2017
shadow of writer at Long Pond, Omega Institute, October 2017

 

…of what’s helping me heal from childhood sexual abuse.

In no particular order.

  1. Dancing. These days, dancing = attending my awesome Zumba class in Yellow Springs. It’s liberating. It’s helping me unwind the long-bound-up energy in my pelvis. When I have a week without Zumba, I feel the lack. The teachers (Gina and Melissa) are wonderful. There’s a room full of women (and sometimes a man or two, too, which is great!), of various ages and colors of skin, and we drop it low low drop it drop it low low… sometimes we cool down to the Beastie Boys. It costs $2 per class; you put your money in the box by the door, the honor system. Close as it gets to perfection. At times, I imagine the room full of dancers as an army of survivors…I say to myself, “okay, predators, I dare you to enter this room. You want your ass kicked? Bring it on.”  Extremely empowering for a “nice” girl who was socialized to be nice and take care of everyone but herself.
  2. Being with other women who understand. I’m fortunate to have many strong and amazing female friends, and lots of people to talk to. Including my mother. The more I talk about it, the easier it gets to talk about. It also helps when I can remind myself that right now, many women are feeling exhilarated about #metoo and the truth-telling, and many are feeling vulnerable & exposed, and both, and yes, and every shade in between. It’s heady, and for me the sensation changes from one breath to the next with all this release of secrets and shame. This collective vulnerability feels new to me. (I know part of the newness to me is because I’m white, so I have felt relatively “safe” in many ways, walking around on the planet during my lifetime, unlike the experience of many people of color.)
  3. And I visit a skilled, compassionate therapist.
  4. Writing. Writing anything, but especially writing about it, in various forms, and writing letters to the inner critic, and writing, because it means I’m alive and I can use my voice. Like now on this blog post. Like when I run into someone later today at the store, and I’m sure something will be spoken, something from out of the shadows.
  5. Breathing. Similar to writing…I’m alive and I can use my voice. Sometimes breathing helps me remember that the past and the future are not real. Just now, this moment, is what’s real.
  6. Listening to (and singing) fortifying songs. Like “In The Roots We Are Together”, by Eleanor Brown, for ALisa Starkweather, which my dear friend Amy Chavez introduced to our circle last year, after that predator was elected president. Please find the lyrics below.

(How are you healing these days?)

Love, Rebecca

IN THE ROOTS WE ARE TOGETHER

by Eleanor Brown

I am still love 

I am still here 

Even in the ravaging crying of a river 

I’m breathing this fire whilst still under water 

I am still loving this heart on dilation 

Unraveling unending keep singing her forward 

I am still love 

I am still here 

We rise and we fall, are we wise or we fools? 

Are we walking us home, are we leaving it all? 

Cracking us open, gold digging down there 

Are we saving our lives, are we great saboteurs? 

In the roots, in the roots, in the roots we are together 

We are here. We are love.

 

rebeccakuder

Letter to the inner critic: Day 5 (fragments for the lying liar)

photo of blogger
Imperfection rocks.

(I blogged here about writing a letter to the inner critic for 30 days. You are still/always welcome to join me! Fragments from today’s letter are below. Disclaimer: The inner critic, for me, is many things, and can sometimes be negotiated with and can sometimes be helpful. Today’s fragments focus on the less helpful aspects, because that’s what came up.)

If anyone out there is doing this practice, please feel free to comment on how it’s going! I’ll blog more as we go along.

***

 

5 November 2017

Dear Inner Critic,

I’ve realized something. You’re a liar. You have been so unhelpful over the years…you’ve been the cataloguer and amplifier of lies…have collected trash and shit and saved it to throw at me. Why? …what do you gain by this continual flinging? Does it make you feel better about yourself, or does it make you feel special, or powerful? Real power comes from being wise and kind. Your kind of power is empty and destructive. There’s no need to tear me down, but you have made it your mission. And you’ve found my vulnerabilities and mined them, have become a specialist. I wish you had something of your own so you didn’t feel you have to take mine. It’s an empty life you lead, you’re just a shell collecting bile to toss at me. Until you can get that out of your system, I won’t like having you near me. You keep that in mind. I have beautiful walls that I’m building to protect me from your spewing, and you won’t be able to reach me. The walls are how I shut you out. Maybe someday you’ll get tired of screaming at me.

Love, Rebecca

rebeccakuder

New old project

IMG_20170908_094213541

Fall cleaning and (finally, again) rifling through piles of paper so I can some day love my office…I found evidence that my new project is actually quite old. Turns out I’ve been writing it for years.

It’s hard to articulate how comforting this is. Like finding out you are who you always thought & hoped you were. Soon I’ll have the luxury of going to a week-long workshop where I can dive into that mess.

IMG_20170908_082131758
(SFA socks from my dear friend Sally)

 

rebeccakuder

My Naming

 

IMG_9493.jpg
Glen Helen, 4/24/16

Here are some words that arrived as I was waking up this morning. So I wrote them down.

**

My Naming

I am from You don’t get to name me. I am from Give me enough time and I will name myself.

I will turn over all the stones and I will find what I need for the naming; I will find the paint and the bones and the breath. I will find the nest of flowers and I will find the eggs.

In the hunting-places it is so quiet that you can put your ear on the ground and hear nothing, hear forever. You don’t need to speak there; you don’t even need to keep your eyes open.

You will read my name in my hair. You will wind my shed hairs into a lute and play the song that is my name. I will shed hairs and weave a web and write my name in my sleep.

rebeccakuder

How It Felt To Me

Tell me what you can see here.
What you can see here?

In her essay, “On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion writes:

“…perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont…maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.”

I’m writing a piece in which I wanted so badly to use these words, but I used another part of Didion’s essay, had to let go of this treasure for the sake of the whole fabric I’m making…but I love this passage. I love its cadence, I love the self-doubt and rumination. This progression from Fact toward How It Felt To Me is an important and rich one, and we dismiss it at our humanity’s peril. This has been on my mind a lot, sparked anew last night when I read David Ulin’s piece about redefining creative nonfiction, in which Ulin writes, “all art is a kind of hybrid, reality reconstructed, redefined.”

Yes.

We get up each morning. Unless we are nudists, we put on layers, veils, makeup, clothing to disguise or hide or redefine something about ourselves. “Reality” is manufactured somewhere inside each human brain. (I am not a brain scientist; I don’t remember which part, but I have read about this, and I think this is true.) Things happen, there are facts, and facts are arguably “real” or “true”, but it seems to me the realm of literature, or art, is built upon everything else. The murk. How It Felt To Me. Even when I’m writing fiction, How It Felt To Me matters much in the making. Even if I am creating a world and pretending it doesn’t actually exist, even if I am telling Lies, How It Felt To Me can’t help but steer the making. (I could lie to myself now and say it doesn’t, but lying takes too much breath, breath I could instead be using to write, breath I could be using to stay alive.)

The fun is grappling around in the mess of these parts.

The fun is shaping stuff from the parts.

rebeccakuder

What we can control

(An old wheel, Casa Loma, Toronto. Summer 2014.)
An old wheel, Casa Loma, Toronto. Summer 2014.

(Not much!)

But in reflecting on some of the work of my students, I wrote this in a narrative evaluation about gaining a deeper understanding of what it is to write and be a writer. I thought it was worth posting here:

It’s crucial to realize that if a piece of writing doesn’t come out perfect (and rarely does it come out perfect), it can always be improved. Knowing this (and living it) is much more important than any sort of inherent talent or inspiration. Doing the work is really the only thing a writer can control.

rebeccakuder

On self-doubt (fuel for writing?)

Peregrine falcon babies. Do they have self-doubt?
Do peregrine falcon babies experience self-doubt?

I got an email from a writer friend who is working on a complicated memoir. She is stuck in the process. In her email, she described the self-doubt that crept in after witnessing a commercial agent dispensing what I consider toxic advice at a workshop. When another writer at the workshop described her own work-in-progress to the agent, because the described work falls outside the expected form for a self-help book, the agent said it was a bad idea and it would never sell.

To repeat: The agent said it was a bad idea and it would never sell.

When I think of this, a cliché tingles the back of my neck (clichés are based in truth, right?): the hair at the nape prickles, a shortcut for anger. Thanks, Agent. Way to shut a writer down! Here’s an adaptation of what I wrote back to my friend:

DISBELIEVE WHAT THAT AGENT SAID! WHATEVER MESHUGAS THE AGENT SAID, WRITE THE AGENT’S WORDS ON A PIECE OF PAPER AND THEN BURN IT!!!!!! KISS THAT ADVICE GOODBYE! That agent only has experience with commercial, old school, traditional publishing, and there is room for SO MUCH MORE in the world of writing. That agent doesn’t know everything! NO ONE knows everything!

From all I understand about writing a complicated memoir, you are in exactly the right spot—excavating the words, memories, feelings, and then shaping and giving it form is a messy and idiosyncratic experience. I know it’s incredibly rough. (I have sprawling, passionate fragments that I might some day shape into a whole memoir, but I’m not yet ready. Even the questions I have to uncover and ask in that process are too intimidating for now.) One message that emerged from all the writers at the Antioch Writers’ Workshop this summer is that EVERYONE operates in the world of self-doubt. EVEN keynoter Andre Dubus III said as much, and so did everyone else presenting. (“The faster I write, the more I’m able to outrun my self-doubt,” said writer Gayle Brandeis. I want to tattoo that line inside my eyelids.)

I’m coming to understand that self-doubt is our fuel.

Self-doubt keeps us honest and also helps us do the work. A paradox, because self-doubt can also cripple the writer. Many writers (more seasoned and articulate than I am) write about the plague of self-doubt. My advice (which I give freely to myself, yet have a hard time taking) is to acknowledge the self-doubt, realize that it’s part of the process, whether you’re writing work based on your direct experiences, or creating fictional worlds. Tie it up in a bundle, give it a name, and then laugh at it. Let it be your fuel.

Trudge through the snowstorm of self-doubt, and do the work (she tells herself).