David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

photography

What if we’re more talented than our inner fears allow us to admit?

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I’ve always been terrified to believe I’m talented.

It was easy to believe I was smart. School work came easily, so my grades were good. Everybody told me I was smart. I had objective measures that showed I performed better than other people.

But talent was a much scarier issue. I could take IQ tests or other standardized tests which seemed to prove I was bright. But there were no tests for talent. No matter what I did, I was always terrified that it wasn’t good enough. Even though other people told me they loved the creative work I did, I was scared to get my hopes up.

So I lied to myself. Maybe you do, too.

Writer V.S. Naipaul famously wrote, “The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.” And my self-deception about my talent has held me back time and time again.

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

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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.

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Experimentation produces beauty that won’t come from slavishly following One True Way

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about monopolies. We’re told that monopolies are bad when most people choose to use a particular company for a certain product or service, but few people realize that the biggest and most abusive monopoly of all is whatever government claims authority over people against their will.

I’m a big fan of blind experimentation, so I do a lot of things just to see what will happen. As an amateur photographer, I take a lot of very random pictures — exclusively with an iPhone 4 lately — so a lot of them are very bad and very useless. But sometimes a result comes through that surprises me and makes something beautiful that I didn’t anticipate.

Friday, I wanted to experiment with shooting directly into the sun, one of the most useless experiments possible in photography. For whatever odd reason, the lens flare that I got happened to create this lovely pattern — quite unexpected, quite unplanned, quite serendipitous. Things like that don’t happen when everything is planned and ordered and there’s only One True Way.

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