On Writers' Avoidance

Procrastination, in many cases, is really a form of Avoidance.  I’m practicing a form of avoidance right now, actually, by writing about my trouble with it instead of facing what I’m avoiding: writing my book.

It’s quite ridiculous, really.  I get everything prepared.  I open my computer, get my document to the place I left off, make my tea, sit down to write… and all the while, my eyes look everywhere except at the words on my screen.  I devise reasons I should check my email and daily comics (to get it out of the way so it won’t be on my mind and distracting me later), play with the cats (to wear them out so they stop coming up to get my attention), wash the dishes (it has to be done sometime), and any other number of tasks.  I can’t type when I eat a meal, so I read a book or watch YouTube videos instead, and get so caught up and relaxed I forget about writing for a time.  

In between these distractions, I open the document, resolving to write… and it’s as though some magician has cast an “ignore me” spell; my eyes slide away.  I can’t bear to look at the text long enough to read a word.

A little bit of psychoanalysis suggests I’m afraid of something.  But what?  Afraid I’ll read what I’ve written and hate it?  Afraid of not expressing the story well?  Afraid I’ll get interrupted and lose my momentum?  Afraid of failing?  Afraid of succeeding?  Am I just uncertain about how to proceed?

I tell myself to just write--editing can come later.  But I’ve revised some of the characters’ personalities in my mind, such that their behavior needs to change, and I have a few scenes that need to be re-written to avoid being trite or preachy or simply long-winded.  The way I do that will affect future scenes and the amount of exposition needed.  But when I just edit, I make no substantial progress.  (Except I feel more confident about the beginning now.  ...Kinda.)

If I have all these ideas, what is stopping me from acting on them?  Is this “spirit of restraint” writer’s block in my own mind, or a divine stop sign?  I hardly think it’s demonic--nor external pressures.  Prayer, well, maybe I’m not “praying the right way.”  I feel no direction or restraint when I pray.  I’m more productive with a pencil and paper, but then I can’t bring myself to type the scenes up where they belong in the document because I am avoiding the sight of it.  This has gone on for months with very brief progress on only a couple occasions.

Has anyone else experienced this?  What worked for you?

On Self-Hate

Self-hate is a deadly habit.  And like all habits, it’s hard to break.  I know--I’ve been trying since at least junior high.

From what I’ve observed, self-hatred assaults introverts more than extroverts.  We’re the ones who “live inside our heads” more, and yes, familiarity breeds contempt.  We know humanity as a whole is in a bad way, but we’re the specimen we observe the most.  

But it’s more than that.

There’s a certain frame of mind, an expectation of perfection.  We know the ideal self we want to be and hate when we don’t measure up to our standards.  We find our self-worth in our accomplishments and the praise of others.  We’re extra sensitive to criticism and embarrassment, less able to cope with the fact that we’re fallible and that our products don’t always match the picture in our minds.

But it’s not just the “incident of the week” that causes grief.  I’ve had a lot of years to collect memories that still mortify me to this day, even incidents from elementary school that most people would look back on with a chuckle and a shake of their heads, saying, “I was just a crazy kid, then.  Oh, well.”  My response is to call myself names and look for the nearest surface on which to bang my head.

Recollections of errors and humiliations from yesterday, last month, or ten years ago invariably come to mind multiple times a day, triggered by innocuous sights and keywords.  Sometimes I wasn’t even at fault, but someone said or did something hurtful, and it stuck with me like a burr on a sock that pokes my ankle when I step just wrong.  This translates into a lot of self-directed anger--sometimes quickly snuffed by reason or productive activity, but sometimes lowering me for much longer and encouraging a retreat into unproductive escapism to get away from myself.

Funny thing is, we critical types often defend this tendency to be overly critical.  We think (that is, hope) that it spurs us to improve, become better people.  But it doesn’t always.  Sometimes we get so sick of trying and failing to do right that we give up--for a time or forever--and hate ourselves even more for it.

I’ve had several people tell me over the years, as if it would remedy everything, that all I needed was a thicker skin.  First off, that’s another insult to a sensitive mind--one more way in which I can castigate myself for being deficient.  Second, that gives a person no constructive way to go about getting a thicker skin.  

I can imagine how it’d work, based on the metaphor: A callus is built when a patch of skin gets roughed up over and over.  So it sounds like people are telling me I should suffer more so I suffer less with each insult.  Really?  The amount of insults I give myself, you’d think I’d be as thick-skinned as a dragon by now, and just about as friendly.  Thankfully, I don’t think I’m the unfriendly, but though the wisdom of age has thickened my skin more than it was, I still can't be called "thick-skinned."  A similar metaphor is “Let it go, like water off a duck’s back.”  That one’s a little more constructive, but how can I grow a metaphorical feather barrier?  Water is a bit adhesive to skin, you know--and unlike negativity, water evaporates with relative speed. 

I have found four techniques that help to decrease my self-hate:

1. Keep a wide perspective of the problem.  What’s the whole situation, exactly?  What may have motivated the other person (or yourself) to say what was said?  Who’s affected, and how much will this problem really affect people’s lives a year or ten years from now? (Avoid the slippery slope fallacy!)  If needed, can you fix it or make restitution?  Can you learn from it?  If nothing can be or needs to be done, clear your mind, take a breath, and think about something else.
2. Stop looking inward so much.  Escapism into fiction or puzzles may help a little.  Taking care of pets can help a little more.  But better yet, turn your gaze on other people. Socialize, volunteer, or do things that help other people.  Consider their needs, their problems, instead of fixating on your own.  Helping others, aside from just being the neighborly thing to do, will also help you feel better about yourself.  
3. Surround yourself with people who support and affirm you.  Demand hugs when needed instead of self-medicating with chocolate, which produces calorie guilt.
4. Most importantly, give yourself grace. Forgive yourself; stop judging yourself for what you’ve done or failed to do, and start looking at who you are--or to put it another way, whose you are.  Define your worth by God’s love for you.  When you forget to do that, when the baggage of your past clings and makes it hard to walk forward, then stop, ask God to take your baggage, and re-center your life on your relationship with Him. 

 
 

On Relating to Other Intelligences, or On Numbers

It's common knowledge that people's minds tend to be inclined toward different sorts of knowledge and understanding: musical, mathematical, linguistic, spatial, kinesthetic, interpersonal, and so forth.  While people can generally function in the other areas, they are typically less proficient than other people so inclined.  Unfortunately, we often forget to account for this difference in understanding when we communicate.  The result (aside from poor communication) may be impatience or scorn on the part of the speaker—and confusion, frustration, or anxiety on the part of the listener.  How, then, does one develop a sensitivity—or might we say bilingualism—for other intelligences? 

I would venture that the first step to improving communication requires basic empathy—insight into the other person's struggles.  Part of this requires acknowledging intellectual differences as, well, differences rather than a sign of stupidity.  Empathy may not help much with the nitty-gritty of how to explain ideas better, but it can improve one's patience with the effort of communicating and thus ease some of the listener's stress.

First, an important note on what not to do: When conversing with a person weak in one's favored area, one ought not think that speaking with this person is akin to speaking with a child.  Yes, one needs to simplify concepts and word choices or to try different approaches, but this perspective tends to make one's tone come across as condescending.  The parallel is also imperfect because a child's mental processes differ from an adult's beyond a mere difference in areas of intellectual strength; young children, for instance, cannot grasp figurative language or abstract concepts well.  But that topic is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

Instead, a more accurate analogy is conversing with a non-native speaker—something to which most people can likely relate in some way.  For the other person, one's jargon and assumptions of basic knowledge may be unfamiliar or may take extra time to process.  

To illustrate this, I can only draw upon my own experiences as an example.  As I do so, I hope the reader will keep in mind that this illustration could be applied to any other area of intelligence, as well.

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For me, numbers are a kind of foreign language, one I’m only partially familiar with.  As with a foreign language, I understand some words automatically; I can immediately grasp numbers one through five, for instance, as easily as I understand “¿Cómo estás?” and “adios.”  I can quickly regurgitate memorized answers to basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division questions involving numbers under 12.  Given time and perhaps paper, I can answer more complicated questions of the same.  Patterns are also easy to recognize when they’re ascending or descending in ones, twos, fives, tens...  But everything else?  Foreign.

Let's give this some context.  I’ve been studying Spanish off and on for some time.  Perhaps I hear or read a sentence, such as Sus ojos son azules y su pelo es marrón.  My thought process goes something like this: “Okay, azules--that’s blue.  Ojos… ojos… that’s either eyes or ears.  Must be eyes, if they’re blue.  Sus--well, without context, it could mean ‘your’ or ‘his’ or ‘hers.’  Anyway, somebody’s eyes are blue.  And… pelo, marrón… I should know those words… oh, hair!  Marrón… it doesn’t mean blond—that’s rubio.  Must be brown.”   There--translation more-or-less complete… but several seconds have gone by, and if other things have been said in the interim, I either missed them or, by hearing them, didn’t finish translating that first sentence. 

This example mirrors my thought process with numbers—particularly numbers I hear, but also with those that I see.

When I first glance at a page of numbers, it’s gibberish—a foreign alphabet.  As I study individual components, I recognize the “language” as one might recognize Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, or Russian text.  In the same way, I may identify the "language" of dates, times, recipe amounts, temperature, tech specs, construction dimensions, addresses, phone numbers, statistics—and the language of basic math, fractions, decimals, percents, algebra, geometry.  Higher levels of algebra, as well as calc and trig, look more like French or Italian to me—languages I've never studied, but whose cognates and Latin derivations make parts of some sentences recognizable.  

If I care to put in the energy, I may then “translate” the numbers and find their significance or the answer.  I may have to re-read some numbers multiple times so I can remember them well enough to compare them with another set of numbers elsewhere, as when I check out our finances or try to understand a news report that's loaded with comparative statistics.  

With spoken numbers, I have to process each one first into its physical, written shape, then into a sense (like a blurred picture) of the amount—accompanied by a judgement of whether that amount is high or low for the given things to which it is applied.  This judgement is complicated by a certain amount of number confusion.  When translating, I often mix up the words "thousand" and "hundred," so when I hear "twenty-five hundred dollars," I have to think about where the comma would go to get an idea of the amount, whether $25,000 or $2,500.  When given a second number, I often can't recall the first well enough to compare the difference unless they're both rounded or smallish numbers, or unless they're written down and I have a moment to compare the two side-by-side.

Thus, written or spoken, this processing of numerical information takes more time for me than it seems to for others.  Moreover, when time is pressed (as on timed tests or when others wait for me to reply or to finish my turn on a board game), it creates emotional stress—as when a foreign language student faces an onslaught of information in a poorly-understood language.  Self-consciousness makes it all worse; I think of myself as being relatively intelligent, so I hate feeling judged for my slowness—my apparently stupidity.  In consequence, when feeling pressed, I will more likely rush and make mistakes or have frantically muddled thinking that slows me further.  I become tense and irritable and more prone to angry outbursts.

To cope—and preserve my sanity and relationships—when I don’t have to process a difficult number, I don’t bother.  So when Joel rattles off the “really cool” statistics for his latest D&D character, describing stacking bonuses to AC, hit, or damage—or when a student talks about statistics for his research paper—I react based on the context or the person's tone because the numbers don’t register quickly enough in my brain for me to make sense of them.  Unfortunately, when the context doesn’t tell me what importance the numbers hold, I must ask the other person to slow down, repeat, explain their significance... or I change the subject. Again, I imagine foreign language students do much the same thing when they don’t understand a word or words.

    
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I hope that this parallel helps readers have a little more patience and understanding with people who become stressed whenever numbers (or musical terms or emotions or other aspects of the various intelligences) come up in conversation.  The speaker would do well to slow down or explain it in alternate ways, and the other party will keep up a lot more cheerfully.

Readers, do you experience the same difficulty processing numbers? Following "easy" dance steps? Understanding music? Something else? Share it in the comments below.

On Transformation

Upon a person’s conversion or rededication to Jesus, outsiders and even the convert himself might easily think, “well, now the hard work’s done!”  Certainly the hard work of salvation is done—and has been done for two thousand years.  And certainly accepting Jesus and receiving the Holy Spirit is glorious and fills our lives with inexpressible joy.  However, not only is it grossly untrue to presume our life path will now be swept clear of all difficulties and work (cf. scriptures), but that attitude can harm the faith of all concerned by setting up unreasonable expectations destined for disappointment.  The persecution of our Lord and the early Church reveal the truth that “in this world [we] will have trouble” (John 16:33).  This we could perhaps weather with inner peace.  However, conversion also begins the painful, chaotic transforming of our souls to resemble Christ’s, and many find this internal process far more challenging than external difficulties.

No matter how far we were from Christ before, beside the emotions of joy and relief, the experience of being born again may feel somewhat frightening, even traumatic—to die to ourselves and be emptied of what was once our very identity for the sake of starting a new life in which we follow Jesus and are identified with Him.  Everything changes: the values that define us, our cherished ideas about the world, our habits of thought and deed, our understanding of who and whose we are—and for our pains, we get our pride torn to shreds as we confess we are not as independent and inherently good as we like to think—that we do not belong to ourselves but must give up our right to ourselves to God.  Although this transformation continues our entire lives, it can be most traumatic when the Spirit first begins to make us His own.  

Everyone who belongs to God has experienced some form of this transformation, whether abrupt or gradual, soul-wrenching or merely pin-pricks.  We all likewise know the pain of “cognitive dissonance” between the World’s attractive ideas and our inherent sin nature, which we must uproot, and the perfect will of God, which He wishes to plant in us.  God must have his way with us, like a potter molding clay or a silversmith refining metal; the process hurts but is necessary for us to be conformed into the image of Christ.

Are you still being transformed by God’s Spirit?  Or do you resist the hands of the Potter in favor of being conformed to this world?

On Natural Godliness

Several thoughts crossed my mind as I read Oswald Chambers’ August 21 devotion “The Ministry of the Unnoticed” from My Utmost for His Highest.  He writes, “. . . The true character of the loveliness that speaks for God is always unnoticed by the one possessing that quality. Conscious influence is prideful and unchristian. If I wonder if I am being of any use to God, I instantly lose the beauty and the freshness of the touch of the Lord. ‘He who believes in Me . . . out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’ (John 7:38). And if I examine the outflow, I lose the touch of the Lord. …If we are conscious of our influence, it ceases to have the genuine loveliness which is characteristic of the touch of Jesus.”

I can attest to the truth of this in my own life.  Excessive introspection eventually throws off my perspective and relationship with the Lord—and thus with other people.  This happens because introspection is self-centered, not God-centered.  When I focus on God, instead, the rest (acting right) comes naturally! 

However, the Lord doesn’t always transform ingrained habits of thought overnight; in such cases we may need to keep an eye on part of our inner self until we can trust ourselves to act or react in a godly way.  I would argue further that, on a few occasions, it does help to take a step back to reflect and re-evaluate ourselves from God’s perspective, just to check that no worldly lies have crept undetected into our thinking.  Generally, though, Chambers has the right of it: we need not monitor our inner self as constantly as some do (particularly introverts such as myself).

When I first read Chambers’ words, though, I couldn’t help but think that we’re human, and from time to time we do lose touch and act out of selfishness rather than love and obedience.  If we are conscious of these mistakes, but remain unconscious when we do right, won’t this produce poor self-esteem and despair of pleasing God? 

After some contemplation, I could see that if we remain introspective and only sporadically connected with God, this could be the result.  But with the ideal relationship that Chambers refers to, our focus would return to Christ after we repent of our error.  With our eyes heavenward, we would spare no thought to ourselves, good or bad.  Our self-esteem or self-perception (when the issue comes up) would be based on who we are in Him, not what we’ve done or not done. 

For people who are deeply concerned with the minutiae of their thoughts and actions, worried whether they’re doing enough to please God, triple-checking that their behavior comes across as properly loving and godly to other people, this message is freeing and simple: don’t tie yourself in knots; love and seek and obey the Lord, letting Him fill all your vision.  Then God’s loveliness will shine naturally—and unconsciously—from you onto those you interact with, no introspection required.

“What does the Lord require of you?  To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8)