You miss 100% of the slaps you don't take
Just because you can take a punch doesn't mean you should
Dear Writer,
Last week we talked about the 10% Bag of Dicks, and why we don’t listen to them and we don't apologize to them and I heard y’all screaming in the void about, “How can I get better at anything if I’m not willing to listen to criticism and feedback?” and OH BOY DO WE NEED TO TALK.
This, along with community, is probably the #1 reason why I built the Year of Writing Magically workshop, because there is no group of people more susceptible to the “rip me to shreds, tell me my momma’s ugly, and make me like it” school of poisonous thought than writers.
This always makes me think of that moment in The Princess Bride where Vizzini keeps misusing the term “inconceivable,” and Inigo Montoya says, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
What I see here is that it’s a concept more than a word that we tend to misuse to our great detriment, and that concept is “feedback is always a good and positive thing.”
As someone who has, for many, many years, believed that my ability to take harsh criticism and brutal feedback made me a better person and a better writer, please let me tell you that I was mistaken, and if you also believe that you must kill every weakness dead dead dead… so are you.
Now, first, there are a lot of societal influences at play that like to tell us that if we can’t take brutally honest feedback, then the problem is with us. This is because societies that are built on power structures like patriarchy and white supremacy benefit when they make us doubt ourselves.
So everything I’m about to tell you will fly in the face of what you’ve been trained to believe, but also, you’ve been trained to believe all of this nonsense by power structures that benefit from your self-doubt so… keep that in mind.
But first, let me say—if you get nothing else out of what I’m about to explain to you, get this:
You are not at your best when you are battling your weaknesses.
You are at your best when you are leaning into your strengths.
Space is limited for my Year of Writing Magically workshop, and applications are flying in; be sure to apply today!
In the same way that pretty much every bullshit thing we’ve been trained to believe can be tracked back to white supremacy and patriarchy—which hurts everyone, trust me—we can also track our willingness to lean into these beliefs as a desire to lean away from vulnerability, because when we are vulnerable, we get slapped by a society that… say it with me… benefits when we (especially those of us who are not white, male and straight) doubt ourselves.
And what’s the best way to make you doubt yourself? By giving you “honest” feedback, using the virtue of “honesty” to provide a gateway for the real goal—brutality—and then calling you weak when that “just being honest” feedback causes problems.
So trust me when I say, I get it. It is scary to give our strengths more attention and power in our work and our personal lives than we do our weaknesses. Having a weakness—any weakness—means that someone can discover that weakness and poke us in that soft, bruised space and the pain may be unbearable. So it would seem that the thing to do is shore up those weaknesses, play an endless and exhausting game of whack-a-mole, and dream of the day when we are practically perfect in every way.
But the truth is, if you’ve spent enough time leaning into your strengths, then those occasional weak spots won’t be so soft, and won’t be so bruised, because you haven’t spent so much time and energy trying to protect those tender parts of you that aren’t “perfect.” You’ve been expanding and strengthening all the parts of you that were already strong, and that literally empowers you to deal easily and swiftly with anything that might need work without falling apart.
Also, dig this; if you ignore your strengths and lean into your weaknesses, you will eventually only see weaknesses.
Imagine a builder who is so worried about termites that that is all they do; kill termites. But the termites keep coming, so that’s where their energy goes, instead of learning how to build a structure strong enough to withstand the occasional termite infestation, and trusting themselves that if termites come, they can deal with them from within the supportive walls of the structure they built.
The trick is you have to lean into your strengths first before you tend to any weaknesses, and you have to know that you will never completely eradicate the weaknesses and that’s okay. Some weaknesses don’t need to be blasted into space, and everything that isn’t absolute perfection is not necessarily weakness.
In addition to this, there are people out there (see the 10% Bag of Dicks) who gain power from making you feel like you’re nothing. They will absolutely find something to criticize, no matter what you do or how well you do it. So opening yourself up to a bag full of dicks and then deciding that their feedback is valuable because it helps you be better is recipe for disaster.
Channel Brené Brown. You get a one-inch square of paper on which to write the names of the people whose opinions on you, your life and your work matter. If someone gives you unsolicited feedback who is not on that one-inch square, not only are you allowed to ignore it, I think you must. If you know them and they have value to you, just literally ignore it and move on. They’ll get the message.
If they are strangers on the internet? 10% Bag of Dicks rule. Delete. Block. Forget.
Nurture your strengths.
Nurture your strengths.
Nurture your strengths.
If you take nothing from your path and mine having connected, please take that.
Everything,
L