The voice of this harsh inner critic still sucks joy from my creative life

By David McElroy · August 26, 2018

My inner critic is constantly busy. Every time I think I’m making progress on quieting his harsh criticism, he pops up again — ready to tell me that my work is no good and that I’m not good enough.

This isn’t anything new. I’ve talked about it before. But since my father died four months ago, I’ve had moments when I thought maybe that voice had died with him. For now, though, the voice is still there, at least part of the time.

This afternoon, I received a really nice note on Instagram from someone who I don’t know. This person posts really high-quality shots of nature and recently started following one of my accounts.

“Hello!” this fellow photographer wrote. “I just wanted to say your photos are so amazing, especially the recent ones! You’ve become my favorite account to follow. Keep up the fantastic work. All the best.”

A sane and reasonable person would feel happy with such praise, but my harsh inner critic seemed to hear only four words: “…especially the recent ones.” So that must mean the things that aren’t recent must be terrible. Why else would he have felt the need to qualify his praise? Right? Something in me felt crushed.

My rational brain knows better. Some part of me knows there was no such criticism intended. But the inner critic doesn’t care what makes sense. The inner critic doesn’t care about anything other than robbing me of the joy which I could otherwise take from my work.

I shot the photo above late this afternoon. I was sitting at a traffic light and suddenly noticed the sun behind this foliage created beautiful colors and highlights. I grabbed my camera from the seat beside me and fired off five quick shots before the light could turn green.

I was happy with the picture. It’s at times like this — when I’ve done some minor thing which few people are going to notice, but which I believe is good — when I feel best about my work. They’re moments in which I realize I do have talent and that I’m getting better and better as I work on the various parts of my craft.

It seems as though those are the moments when the inner critic is most likely to strike. I had posted this picture to Facebook and Instagram. It was a few minutes after that when I got the gracious note from the other photographer.

And that’s when the inner critic struck.

I’ve told you before where this inner critic comes from. My father used to harshly criticize me, especially when I did things for which I received praise. I constantly wanted to impress people — because something in me has always been starved for praise and attention — but when I received that praise, I wanted my father to be proud of me. And that’s always when he found reasons to criticize me and tell me why what I had done wasn’t good enough.

“If you had done this the way I told you, it would have been even better,” was a constant theme of his criticism, even when what I had done had surpassed the work of everyone else around me. He couldn’t just let me bask in the joy of praise.

And the inner critic still tries to play his role, even after he’s dead.

It’s humiliating to admit to you how much I still need your praise. I’m scared my work isn’t good enough. I’m scared other people aren’t going to like it. I’m scared I’ll never be good enough to be the big commercial success I want to be.

I wish I didn’t need that affirmation. I wish my own rational approval was good enough for me. But as long as the inner critic is still there, I’m afraid I’ll still need you to help me overcome that — to let me know I’m doing good work.

Yes, I’m too sensitive about my work. I know that. Even praise can be turned around and made to seem bad. I have to ask for your patience. It’s one of my faults. I’m aware of it, but I haven’t been able to get past this one — so please be patient with my fears.

Note: If you’d like to follow my Instagram accounts, you can find one which focuses mostly on sunsets and random nature shots here and another which focuses on the cats and dog in my life here. I can only imagine how many photos I’ll take one day when I have children whose lives I can document. The small inset photo above on the right is Thomas watching birds outside the house Sunday afternoon. The picture below is Lucy’s Saturday afternoon portrait in the back yard.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

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The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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