Death of a Critic

The drive to publish my work has been building within me for many years, but a voice has always kept me silent. This voice is woven deeply into my mind and I have come to know it as my inner critic. It relentlessly keeps me and my work hidden away with fear and shame, but over the past seven years I have been painstakingly and mercilessly dismantling it. Today marks a turning point where my own mind is no longer working to silence me.

In the past my critic would have stopped me by now. It would have nit-picked every sentence, every word, and every syllable. After perfecting those, it would have focused on the tone, the flow of the words, and the style. Eventually those too would be perfected, only to meet with the critic’s most desperate defence: Appeal to futility. In the past my critic would have me believe nothing is truly worth doing and everything is ultimately futile, but not today. I am resisting those messages, and I am choosing to publish not in spite of the critic but in defiance of it. There are words worth publishing, and they do not need to be perfect.

The lies of the critic have wasted and discarded years of my work. Pages shredded, files deleted, and ideas thrown away. Notions dismissed, possibilities discarded, and potential squandered. All this because my critic needed me to be isolated and alone. Not today though, today I’m changing the script.

I have overcome the critic’s stranglehold by cultivating a new sense of self and building a place within my mind for the free expression of thoughts, feelings, and possibilities. This mental space was once a mere hollow, a sanctuary from the critic’s endless torment, but it now encompasses the majority of my mind. It’s a place of wonder, and nowhere in the physical world could ever hope to compare. This garden within my mind is home to my joy, my curiosity, and my will to grow beyond my limitations. This space is far beyond the critics reach, and from here there are no limits.

If you are reading these words, then my critic failed today. It fell by the wayside, a victim of its own failures, and hereon out my life and my publications are within my control. A new chapter is just beginning, and the critic is no longer a character in my story. So I will simply say to it, so long and good riddance, you were never welcome and I’m not sad to see you go. This is the end for you.

As for you, dear reader, I’ve been waiting to meet you for so very long. So hear me speak with a full tongue and boundless spirit as I say, hello world!