AW:M1EX3

Time Travel: List three old enemies of your creative self-worth. Please be as specific as possible in doing this exercise. Your historic monsters are the building blocks of your core negative beliefs. [...] This is your monster hall of fame. More monsters will come to you as you work through your recovery. It is always necessary to acknowledge creative injuries and grieve them. Otherwise, they become creative scar tissue and block your growth. (The Artist's Way, p. 38)

Enemy number one: [redacted]

They were a harmful and controlling influence over me when I was young. I think my creativity was viewed as a threat of some kind by [redacted]. They would always tell me what I was doing wrong in my writing, art, or performance of any kind. It was only when I got involved with color guard in high school that [redacted] got off my back to some extent because I drilled mercilessly in the routines which [redacted] didn't know enough about to criticize me on. There were backhanded comments about my writing on a fairly regular basis. [Redacted] was creative in their own fashion, aside from heaping pressure and verbal castigation in new ways. I think [redacted] just wanted to live through me and assume control over my creative life instead of living their own.

Enemy number two: [redacted]

[Redacted] and I were close friends in middle school. [Redacted] always laughed at my dreams of being an author. They treated it all like it was one gigantic joke. They would at times steal my notebook and read what ever I was working on aloud to the study hall. This never ended well because I was one of the most bullied kids in our grade. [Redacted] was just tone deaf or perhaps covertly malicious at that time. I don't know anymore. But, the way they made me feel when they read my poetry at full volume in the most dramatic style they could manage was humiliated. [Redacted] and I haven't seen each other in close to fifteen years. I don't think they even remember the goals I had to be an author and would justify their humiliation of me as 'all in good fun.' I stopped dealing with [redacted] after I came back from college and realized just how toxic that 'friendship' was. It broke my heart but I still think I made the right decision. I can't seem to write poetry with out feeling like it's all just something someone's going to laugh at.

Enemy number three: [redacted]

I confess, I admired [redacted]. I suppose you could say that I idolized them to some extent. They were brilliant. They were well studied in literature and poetry. They taught at a prestigious college. In many ways, [redacted] was who I wanted to be when I finished college. With a few books to their name, a rock solid career in their chosen field, and a genial demeanor, [redacted] was someone I respected highly. It made the shock of their literal crushing of a poem I wrote gut wrenching. They took it in hand, read it, and instead of handing it back to me, they crushed the piece of paper it was printed on (thank goodness I had enough sense not to give them the original), and told me that I was a hack who was aping the work of Edgar Allen Poe. It felt like I had been slapped in the face, twice when they threw the page away. I was half tempted to get it out of the waste bin. I didn't. I just mumbled an apology. As I was walking away, [redacted] called after me to comeback when I had some original work. After that, they graded my papers savagely. I wound up going to the head of the department after a particular paper got a grade that I knew wasn't fair. The department chair looked the paper over and adjusted the grade higher. [Redacted] and I never spoke again. I made a point of being silent in lecture where I had been an enthusiastic participant in discussions. I avoided them on campus and pretty much did my best to be the last one in the classroom when it was time for lecture and the first one out (making a point of having my work schedule changed so that I had to be at work immediately after class). After the experience I had with [redacted], I doubt pretty much everything I write. My writing poetry dwindled from four or five a day to one or two. After the trauma of 2003, I wrote maybe one poem a month. Then I just stopped.