Emerging after Feedback: Facing Internalized Shame and Creativity Scars
Dear Professor
Your red ink seared a scar on my soul.
It seems minor now, I suppose.
At the time though, it bled, continuously.
Dr. Jacobson, did you know then?
I bet you knew, meaning for your ink to wound.
The red scratch through my words,
“Clouds don’t saunter,” you said.
When was the last time you laid on the grass,
And gazed up at the sky’s cotton candy clouds?
How old were you when your momma scolded you for being airy?
Clouds run and dance.
They streak naked in full daylight.
They mosey casually without care.
At times, they collide when the winds want to play.
Clouds most assuredly DO saunter across the sky, Dear Professor.
I wrote this for many reasons. It connects to things I have been processing lately and also serves as a response to some activities I have asked my doctoral students to reflect on here at mid-semester.
Themes on my mind and heart of late:
1) How we lose our humxn connection to nature over the course of our childhood through formal education and feedback. I’m working through lately how the main paradigm of education is harmful to our souls as humxns and needs to be (un)learned and recreated to correct some of the current chaos and pain in the world. It’s largely harmful because those in it have not processed through their own emotions to create awareness and mindfulness to guide actions. Education mostly disassociates our true nature and Mother nature from intellectual pursuits and this comes at our own peril as well as the Earth’s.
2) How to develop our authentic writing voices when there’s so much negative feedback. This semester, I’m grateful to be teaching our intro to scholarly writing course for new doctoral students. I knew I wanted to incorporate conversations and exercises that get at this core of our creativity scars, as Brené Brown calls them in Dare to Lead. The idea that feedback so often comes from the place of other’s people’s wounds and scares that they then inflict upon others. I’ve asked students to reflect on how shame shows up for them and what scars they hold that might get in the way of their writing and research.
3) With a couple of fellow coaches, we just started week 1 of 12 in the book, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron. In the first chapter, Cameron talks about identifying the monsters to our creative self-worth. The story in this poem, while benign really, hit the core of my self-worth as a writer during undergrad when I was overly vulnerable to outside feedback as a determination to my own worthiness. I secretly held the desire to be a writer and this is one of those moments where I allowed feedback to validate my inner gremlins of shame that I could never be a writer. This is my processing through that and saying ‘shame, you rule me no more’!
How have you faced your creative gremlins and monsters of the past? What creative scars need to be healed?