Once I wanted to be a professional photographer. As a teenager, I sold photos, talked to pros about their careers, entered competitions and even sometimes won.
But I got stuck. Here’s how I am getting unstuck.
It seemed like the more I wanted it the less I could take pictures. The more I pushed, the louder my inner critic chattered. It was unpleasant enough that I started to go years without even looking at my camera.
If I could keep from doing anything too creative, I thought I could starve that vicious inner critic. Instead, I felt the joy leaching out of life.
The usual explanation in creativity literature seems to be that self-protection leads to perfectionism which leads to procrastination. In this myth, the inner critic is something to overcome. The advice the follows in such literature is then about pumping up your self esteem, disregarding the inner critic, or even doing away with him all together.
Maybe that’s sometimes right, but not in all cases.
Creativity and conscience
I have a different hypothesis. I think the inner critic is an overactive conscience. If so, it’s something like the sum of all the fears to which I have been exposed. I think the inner critic and fears are in a reciprocal relationship that can reach critical mass and run away. A little like physical inflammation.
If this is true, the inner critic doesn’t need to be quelled, it needs to be healed and settled. When you try to quell it, you attack yourself. And you can end up no better off. I found that to the extent I stifled my inner critic, I dulled my senses.
I developed a tin ear for others and myself. I could tell that I couldn’t tell if something was any good.
The upshot for this green leaf picture is that, by shutting down my ability to take pictures, my inner critic went too far. It alerted me to its invalidity.
It revealed that imperfection hurts less than stifled creativity. That’s what I was figuring out when I took this picture.
The inner critic had made it possible to only take bad pictures, so I decided to take bad pictures. I decided that I could still show family and friends what I was seeing while on a walk for instance.
When that started to get comfortable, I started to send some of the more interesting ones to people.
Every time it got comfortable, I took mediocre photography a little further. I created an Instagram account and shared photos with a less sympathetic audience. The more I shot and published, the more joy came back into my life. And the pictures started to improve.
If I risked I might lose, but if I tried not to risk anything, I guaranteed loss. This website, and especially this post, is part of that. The next level of risk.
That green leaf picture is not perfect. Not at all, and I have included it without fixing its flaws in part because I know I need to keep risking. And because in it I found hope that my ability to see was coming back.