The Not Good Enough Monster

[Unbroken1]

Before I learned about the concept of the inner critic, it had already become known to me as the Not Good Enough Monster.

I moved cross-country after my divorce to a uNPD of the communal subtype with whom I had been in a 23-year relationship. My ex and I both worked in the same creative field, doing design for print publication, and each had a home office. We both have degrees in Fine Art and part of my post-divorce relocation plan was to establish a career as a fine artist in the area I've moved to.

I successfully took part in a couple of Art Studio Tours and the sales were impressive. But I am also continuing my career as a designer and also have a small vacation rental attached to the house I bought when I moved. So I already have two income-producing gigs and want to make painting more important in the balance of priorities, but am just not able to create the time and head space to do that. The pandemic destroyed my client base, and the vacation rental is barely covering my expenses, so the focus at the moment is on those two areas that are most reliable in providing financial support. I have a potential business opportunity on the horizon with a colleague, but that will take a while to get going.

I believe the "creative block" is due to all the important people in my life actively discouraging me to do this, particularly my father, whose praise for my artistic skills was nonexistent and who also treated my mother's creative skills as a vanity pursuit. I believe had she not had her own aspirations to be an artist destroyed in the same way by her father and then her husband, she possibly wouldn't have suffered from clinical depression and what I now believe was uBPD. But she was complicit when I was told that I could study commercial, rather than fine art, when I went to college.

My seeming inability to do what is one of the few pursuits that brings me joy is tearing me apart internally. I recognize that I have been creatively frozen for so long, I am afraid that I'll never be able to be free of the NGEM. On top of that, my ex has established a reputation as a successful artist in the area I moved from, so I compare myself to her and of course, always come up short.

Are there any other creatives out there who have faced any personal challenges like this? Wondering if anyone has managed to free themselves of the negative inner critic?

[Papa Coco]

Unbroken1

Your life's story is quite a bit different from mine, but there is one glaring similarity: Creative blockage.  I have a creative nature, but my family wrapped it in chains, humiliated me for it, and guided me toward factory work. So I've lived my life very frustrated. I've always made good money, but always from working in a factory, doing as I'm told by the "real world" (as it is defined by other obedient drones).

As a child I begged for music lessons. My Idol was Victor Borga. He was a master pianist, an always funny comedian, and he gave himself to the world as a genuinely beautiful soul. I wanted to be like him so bad: Talented, funny and kind. What a wonderful triple threat to be.

At my factory job as a corporate educator, I used his quote as a footer on my emails "The shortest distance between two people is a smile." As a child, my dream was to learn to be a pianist/comedian. But my parents had a clever way of gaslighting me whenever I wanted anything. First they'd say, "You don't want that." And on the rare occasions that I didn't fall for their correction, if I pushed it further, they'd just say "No." And if I pushed it any further yet, they'd tell me "If we let you have a [piano], [bike], [paper route], [join a ball team], [any other request here], you'll just quit playing and then we'll be stuck with some stupid piano [bike], [paper route] we don't want."

When I was 11, my abusive Catholic school finally created a relationship with the public schools to allow us to participate in their band programs, I went home almost hyperventilating with excitement, to tell my mom I had a chance to get music lessons that way. Without hesitation, she said "Absolutely not. You'll make me buy you and instrument, you'll quit and I'll be stuck with that damned musical instrument."  By this time, I'd been gaslighted so often for so many years that there was no fight in me. I just gave up and never asked again.

But the gaslighting took. At 14 I aged out of Catholic school and got to attend the better public high school where kids were treated more like human beings than whipping posts. Public schools had drama clubs, but by this time I had just learned that if I tried to do ANYTHING creative, my parents would come down hard on me, and my siblings would laugh at me. Joining drama could destroy me at home. So I just put all creative outlets in my head as if they were the "I wish I could, but I can't" category, like becoming an astronaut or the King of England. Fantasy. Creativity became fantasy, and I lost any belief I'd ever be able to create anything.

But I also grew up with a very strong desire to become a novelist. Catholic school, sexual abuse, gaslighting, having uNPD elder siblings and "crazy" parents (My T doesn't use that word on many people, but he has told me that "crazy" is the best description for my parents), had pushed me so deep into my dissociative brain, that I lived more than 85% of my conscious life in my head writing stories in my mind. I had so many stories I could use as fodder for novels, but for the first 50 years of my life, if I sat down to a computer or typewriter to write anything, I went into absolutely rock-solid writer's block. The stories were alive in my brain and were more real than "real life" but my brain would not allow me to put them on paper.

There's a chance that my mom had done that to me. When I was a boy, I did start writing a few private things on paper. I'd put it deep into my little writing desk. I'd hide it the best I could. But that "crazy" mom searched my room constantly, and no matter what I wrote, she'd have it in her hand when I'd get home from school, and she'd be angry. "What is THIS about?" Today, at 62, looking back, and knowing that even my T sees her as crazy, I feel it's pretty easy to see that she shamed the ability to write right out of me. The trauma responses that I live with became a part of my brain that spent the next several decades lovingly protecting me from being humiliated again by my family. So whenever I'd go to write one of my complex stories onto paper, that part of me would step in and lovingly block me from putting myself in danger again.

Okay, so to end this story: Mom died when I was 48. The narcissists in the family exploded into total insanity as they started vying for position to inherit Dad's money as soon as he might die next. They used every lying, dirty, gossipy trick they could to turn the extended family against me so that I'd kill myself, the way they'd gotten my little sister to do. Shortly after my 50th birthday, I was rescued from my suicide attempt AS I WAS HEADING to the bridge to jump from. I was given outside help that led me to go 100% No Contact with all family, extended family, and any human being who ever knew my family.  THE VERY NEXT DAY, the dam broke in my brain and I started writing novels. I was writing so fast my fingers hurt. The words were coming out of my brain faster than I could type them out.  I spent the next 7 years writing, joining writers groups where we would critique each other to improve our books. I hired coaches, I took writing classes. My T says that he's worked with writers his whole life and has never seen anyone so compelled to sit at my computer for days on end compulsively writing and writing and writing, unable to stop myself.

I ended up with a series of three novels that I published through a New York publisher in 2017. Novels that I'm so proud of, that I myself read them again once a year just because I love my characters so much, by reading the stories I wrote, I feel like I'm visiting live people who I haven't seen in a year.

So I guess you could say that when I walked away, 100% walked TOTALLY away from my abusive family, that my brain finally saw that I was no longer in danger and it stopped trying to help protect me from their abuse. My brain stopped protecting me, my writer's block shattered, and my stories gushed out onto the paper faster than I could type on the keyboard.

Unfortunately, I still burn with frustration that I can't seem to learn to play piano. I bought a beautiful piano for myself for Christmas this year but sitting down to it just feels like I'm sitting down to a boulder. My fingers don't move well. I can't practice for more than a few minutes before I feel like I'm doing something I'm not supposed to do. My employer of 42 years sold my job to India two years ago, so I'm retired now and looking for ways to feel like I'm not just waiting to die. Writing has become difficult again. But for those 7 years I was in HEAVEN as I was creating those first three novels.