A Gem To Behold.
A conversation with my therapist that I haven't stopped thinking about.
Last week my therapist asked me a question that has completed changed how I talk to myself.
I had been explaining to her the shame I carry around my creative success. The belief that becoming a successful artist will always be my life’s greatest challenge. That going after the things I want most will always feel like pushing a rock up a hill. That I will always be hard on myself when I can’t find creative flow, the inspiration, or the discipline to keep going. That I’ve felt this way for so long, it must just be how my brain operates.
She sat there and listened. And then asked: “Are you aware that you treat your shameful thoughts like a disability?”
“Hold on. A disability?” I gawked. “That feels a bit dramatic.”
I immediately became defensive.
She came back with: “Disabilities are things we must learn to deal with. Aspects that are truly out of our control. We can’t change them, so we learn to adapt and make them manageable. Do you really believe you’re not capable of changing the way you think about your creative success?”
I sat there for a good thirty seconds without saying anything.
She was right. I have been operating under the belief that I have no control over these thoughts. Like, at all. That I just have to accept this is how I am.
That was three weeks ago. I’ve been thinking about it every day since. Every time I sit down to write another essay or submit an audition, I feel the shame rise up. I hear it in my head, and I hear myself saying “there it is. The inevitable.” The usual “you’re not doing enough, you’re falling behind, who do you think you are” blah blah blah. And instead of just absorbing it like I always do, I’m catching it. Watching it arrive. I know exactly what it is doing. And it still just... stays. The honest truth I’m learning is once you know something is happening in your head, that doesn’t just magically stop it from happening. This is the part nobody tells you.
These past three weeks I keep asking myself the same question: how long have I actually been telling myself this is permanent? That this is something that cannot be fixed. When did this begin? Where did I even learn this?
And the part I keep coming back to is that I wasn’t born with this. My younger self didn’t feel shame to this extent, because she hadn’t learned to yet. And that’s the key thing here. I learned to feel this way. I couldn’t tell you the exact moment this “stuck” as my default. Somewhere between growing up in an environment with so much pressure to succeed and spending years in an industry that can feel relentlessly superficial, shame became the default setting.
Consciously I know this. And yet I still don’t know what to do with it.
There’s something uncomfortable about receiving an insight that should feel like relief and instead just feels like more weight. Like, okay, great. I’m aware of this. Now what?
When I was younger, I didn’t feel any of this when I woke up with a new idea of who I wanted to be. It just came to me. And I received it like it was a gem to behold. No second-guessing, no bracing for what it would cost me. Just the spark, and then the full-body yes.
I remember being ten and deciding I was going to be a famous singer. I told everyone. I wasn’t embarrassed. I didn’t preface it with “I know this is a long shot” or “I’m probably not good enough but.” I just said it like it was already true, because to me it was. And then two weeks later I wanted to be a english teacher and that was equally true. There was no shame in changing. No sense that I was failing the previous version of myself. Each new idea was just more proof of how interesting I was.
The truth is, I don’t know how to get back to that. And I’m not sure I can, at least not entirely. But I think about her a lot. That little girl who hadn’t learned yet that wanting things could be dangerous.
I know she’s still in there somewhere. Waiting for me to stop treating her like a liability.
If you want to go deeper with this, check out this weeks new meditation here.