Getting in my own way

Uncomfortable thoughts about self-sabotage (which is difficult to spell)

Me not getting in my way. Photo credit: Ampersand and Grey

On Friday, the last day of May, I faced a soft deadline and voiced my feeling that not getting it done wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. Then my friend told me off - in the way only friends who care deeply will tell us off. She told me I was failing on purpose and that with a little effort I could meet the deadline. In short, she told me to put on my big girl pants and do the work.

I did. It got done. I’m happy and proud.

She made an important if painful point. There's a distinct possibility I've been failing to put enough effort into myself, especially as a writer. That wouldn't make me an outlier. There are plenty of us out there who would rather talk about the obstacles (we call it "being realistic") than power through and get the thing done. It's self-sabotage, though, and I need to stop doing it if I want to build a writing career.

So, what is self-sabotage and how does it turn up in writers? According to Bonnie Friedman in the article Writers and Self-Sabotage, it's pretty much anything we do to make our selves feel less good about our work. Her form of self-sabotage was stopping to look at a bookstore book that made her feel bad (because it wasn't hers) every day on her way to work. She did it even though it was killing her "I'm actually a writer" post-morning writing session high.

My favorite Brené Brown moments are when she gets personal, like telling us about a fight with her husband that lead her to try the phrase, "the story that I'm making up" on stage or in Rising Strong. The idea of using the phrase is that switches the conversation from a competition about who's right to a sharing of perspectives and experiences. I prefer "the story I'm telling myself," but same idea. So, what's the story I'm telling myself about my writing and why I'm not getting more done? That's the question I dealt with today in my morning pages. It's something friends and family have been pointing out to me for years: the illusion of my family needing me.

For lots of different reasons, I haven't worked a full-time job since becoming a mom. It was something I predicted long before motherhood. When the kids were younger, when we were doing international moves, it was easy to talk myself into the idea that I needed to be available. But these days, that simply isn't true. The kids can cook and clean and look after themselves. In essence, the idea that my family needs me has become a limiting belief, and I'm holding on to it to combat the grief and shame? Yeah - it might be shame - of not working harder for myself.

The first time I started to understand what a limiting belief was and how it worked was reading Marie Forleo's Everything is Figureoutable. It's one of those books I feel faintly embarrassed to own and have read (we can unpack that another time), but I learned some good lessons there. She wrote that "Beliefs are the hidden scripts that run our lives." That makes it sound like beliefs are as insidious and annoying as the ads that follow you around after you follow that one Instagram ad. Are beliefs our nervous system's version of cookies? Do they get left on our life browser to track our movements and then send up alarms or blocks?

If that's the case, then what are my choices - our choices because you know and I know I'm not the only one struggling with this.

I think it's to be honest, to take a personal accounting, to listen to what people have been saying to us about what we can do and ask ourselves why we disagree with them. None of that sounds fun, but I'm tired of telling people that the only thing standing in the way between me and writing is me. I need to get out of my own way and if this will help me, I'm willing to try and figure out what I'm doing to sabotage myself and how to stop.

Any tips? I'm going to need help figuring this one out.