Fighting My Own Demons

As the words resolutions and goals dance across my social media page, I can feel the pressure increase in my chest with every post I scroll by. Something akin to a herd of elephants tap dancing on my spinal cord renders me temporarily paralyzed both mentally and physically. "What is it that I really hope to accomplish in the year 2024 as a creator"?, I ask myself. Every year I aspire to write more, challenge my creativity more, and somehow end up with a finished product before the year ends. Unfortunately, every year prior to joining vocal, I would start strong and somewhere along the lines I would begin to fall off with consistency. Vocal provided me with something I couldn't seem to set for myself, DEADLINES. When I'm made aware that I don't have an infinite time to get something accomplished, I have more discipline to buckle down and execute the task. Plus, when you know you've paid for a subscription, you get a little extra push to actually utilize it. My first aspiration for 2024 as a vocal creator, is experimentation.

EXPERIMENTATION

I tried a little last year to participate in challenges that I was unfamiliar with, either genre wise or in regard to poetry forms. Sometimes it's hard to really put yourself out there when you have no prior knowledge of the topic in general. The comfort zone is a dead zone, I try to remind myself. I know that improvement will only occur when I play around with different challenges but, it can be scary and (frankly speaking), quite daunting. Being a part of the vocal community though and seeing others express the same reluctance, I realize it isn't just a me thing. We all seem to be in a constant fight with our own inner critic. That takes me to the next aspiration, closing the negative noise in my head.

NOISE CANCELLATION

Picture this: It's a nice summer day, and you're sitting in your lawn chair by the pool, waiting to eat your BBQ fresh off the grill. You can tell from the sweet aroma being carried by the wind, that the extra effort you put in last night is going to be worth it. You generously coated it with meat tenderizer, grill mates, and marinade. You then slid it in the back of the refrigerator, right by your favorite side dishes. You wake up the next day anxiously anticipating when you can finally devour it. The meat hits your plate, and the loud sizzle is enough to get your mouth watering. You grab your fork and prepare to take a bite, and suddenly you hear that loud buzzing noise. Flies!! That's the exact noise I hear when I'm writing. I will have the outline in place (meat preparation), my laptop running (grill lit), and my mental juices flowing (meat cooking), but it's so hard to just sit and enjoy the final product. The noise will make me over analyze each sentence, stress over the consistency of the storyline, and never fully enjoy the finished product. Something that started out so fun, eventually becomes such a strenuous task,by my own doing. This leads me to my last aspiration on vocal, to simply have fun.

HAVE FUN

Writing is all about enjoyment!! Just like reading a good romance novel, writing is a form of stress relief. The challenges themselves are often playful in nature, just like me, so I have to just let go and not take things so seriously. Sometimes I manage to let my inner child show, but the inner critic often wants a wrestling match. I have to remind myself that this isn't a college final, it's just an opportunity for me to work on my craft and potentially find something new I enjoy writing about. I think as creators we are sometimes too concerned with what we believe our creative limitations to be, and not concerned enough with what the general public actually thinks. I really enjoy the social aspect of getting to share our work with others outside of this realm, so we don't all get too much into our own heads. With vocal giving us that extra shove needed, we as creators are more prone to share our work on social media. This then allows me to see things more so from a spectator's point of view, while still comfortably living in this artistic bubble known as vocal.