Portrait of an Inner Critic

Posted on July 30, 2003 in Frustration Guilt Writing Exercises

An exercise from the Wednesday Cafe Writers group that I facilitate at the Aliso Viejo Barnes and Noble:

He looks a lot like me except he doesn’t wear a beard. No, he must be clean-shaven. He scrapes at it all day, incessantly, over and over, never stopping. That’s his life — shaving his face, that and keeping his fingernails clean, the lint off his person, hair combed, teeth flossed until they bleed.

My critic doesn’t have a demonic face. He’s impossibly angelic, pasty faced. I don’t like the look of him. He carries himself like an undertaker, saying “Never give offense, never give offense” except when I am being nailed down in someone else’s coffin. He’s jealous of the wood, you see, and insists that if I am to be buried alive that we use his design, planed to perfection. If another nails me for obeying his rules and his modesties, then it’s out with the spade that he uses to dig graves. He buries me and them in invective until I start tossing and ringing the bell that he’s so thoughtfully provided for me to use in the event of premature burial. “Scream!” he says. “It’s not for me to dig you up! Shout at these others — they are there, they have hands, they must rescue you!”

And at his command and by his recommendation, I do shout, most often thorugh my fingers. How can decent people stand by while I am in this grave that my critic has dug for me? How can they watch while less reverent sorts use my pit as a latrine? Why are they being standing corpses? I shake, I tremble, I cry “this is indecent.” I use his words to describe their behavior, as if their silence were brazen nudity, as if they were standing in their white skins watching while robbers pulled off my clothes, my ring, my gold teeth.