Word After Word

My friend A., just retired from a teaching career, set out, in May, to have a relaxing summer. No big trips (she was just back from Thailand), no big house renovations, just noodling around with the chickens, the grand-baby, plucking slugs out of the herb garden, meeting up with some friends. “I just want time to putter!” she crowed happily last spring. A. lives in

We were talking yesterday on the phone when she said to me, “I’m so mad at myself. I was so slug like this summer. I hate this lazy part of myself.”

I shrieked and the dog frowned in his sleep.

We want it both ways. We want it three or four ways. We use this habit of self-critique not to learn, but to limit ourselves. If she had written two books and grown heirloom corn and made a bundle and started a Montessori program, she would have been saying to me: “Summer flew by, it wasn’t even summer! I have to learn to relax!”

We are so weird. She set out to have the very summer she had, but somehow, her mind still tells her: you did it wrong. She had a glorious, enviable, intentional, beautiful, tasty summer, but no, no credit—that was a wasted one.

Why do we do this?

I do not know. I do know A. is getting ready to write a book, and I suspect this self-critique is fear of starting, fear wearing the summer full dress uniform of a cheesy dictator.

I should have worked all summer! is an insidious way to develop the muscle of not-working.

My friend J. said essentially the same thing in the weight room yesterday. “I didn’t lift all summer. I don’t know what is wrong with me. I was bad.” I laughed so hard. This is how I talk to myself, too, and I can’t imagine saying this kind of thing to someone else. It wouldn’t happen. Why? Because it’s mean, presumptuous, and uninformed thing to say. J actually lifted enormous weight all summer: she moved into a new house. Lots of physical and psychological weight lifted and set down and shifted there. Two huge deaths. A lot of weight this summer.

After being away from my book for only four days, I am having so much trouble concentrating again. Why is it so hard to see what I need to see in my own work? I can see so easily A and J had the right summer though some part of the back-to-school brain is telling them they did summer wrong. But I can’t see where I’m off in my work.