Why You Should Definitely Just Do the Thing

A Peak Notions column on your internal voice, who is an absolute a-hole

Photo by Boudewijn Huysmans on Unsplash

---

“Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror.”

P.G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves

---

I awoke yesterday morning to fifteen hundred new subscribers here on Peak Notions. The interview Substack had asked me to do for their Grow series went live during what was the middle of the night over here, and I hadn’t realised that was due to happen. I was jolted into consciousness in the gloom of a winter morning here in Canberra, blinking dryly at my phone and a bizarrely high number of notifications.  After a rush of delight came some confusion (it takes a minute to remember that I live in Australia now so the unfamiliar bedroom shocks me every morning until I remember). ‘We’ve been kidnapped!’ my brain shrieks. Then, a second later ‘False alarm. You’re just in an Air BnB. It’s all good. Sorry I signalled your heart to stop and your sphincter to clench so very violently. My bad.’ On this particular morning, that confusion was followed by what I usually experience when something nice happens. Ah, yes. There it was – a good old-fashioned shin-kick of Irish shame. Not all people who feel shame are Irish, but all Irish people feel shame for approximately ten hours of their waking day.

Shame is our bread and butter. Our amniotic fluid. It’s the tone in your granny’s voice when you’ve just stumbled greasily into puberty and she glances at your shorts before saying witheringly in front of extended family ‘Ah now. You’re gone very fat altogether. There’s no need for that.’ It’s the grown woman who leaned out the back window of a moving car to roar ‘Nice backpack, freak!’ in the general direction of my confusingly normal backpack as I walked through my hometown of Limerick. Sadly that one isn’t a story from my adolescence. It happened last Christmas and the woman was at least twenty-five. I told my husband when I saw him shortly after and he almost vomited from laughing. Serves me right for storing my belongings conveniently on my back, like ‘a continental’, or much worse, ‘some manner of American’. Yes – Ireland is unbelievably good butter and wonderful folklore, Seamus Heaney and James Joyce and a delectably excoriating sense of humour. But it’s shame too, and dissonance.

Now, you may think ‘Well, all that’s nuts. Your culture seems terrible’. If you’re American, you might have reached the conclusion that I personally am mentally unhinged (who isn’t in this economy?). You’re not necessarily wrong, but shame is wound tightly through the skeleton of Irish culture. It clings to the ribs and stymies the pelvis (in all sorts of contexts including the most obvious one). It might be the Catholicism. It could be the postcolonial mindset that looks outward and upward for both the causes of and solutions to problems. Possibly, the fact that Ireland sees eight days of watery sunshine annually is the root of our intergenerational self-loathing. Like most cultural phenomena, it’s multi causal and far from simple. The result in this instance and on this morning, though, was a voice in my head (possibly my aforementioned utter dose of a grandmother’s) instantly denigrating the positive outcomes of the interview having been published. The kind messages from friends and the emails from other writers. The voice did what it always does. It shrank everything it touched. Me. My efforts. Our collective achievement – yours and mine – in growing this weird little corner of the internet to this point.  

‘Ah now’, the voice said. ‘Your growth here has been slow and your reach is relatively small. Isn’t Margaret Atwood on Substack? What in the Jaysus are they asking you about your Substack for? Who (and this is a question at least three nuns asked me while blinking fishily over the frames of alarmingly strong prescription glasses during the course of my very miserable school years) do you think you are!?’ It’s a valid point, though there are some counterarguments that might silence the voice.  Since it isn’t physical and the voice is very much my own, I’m unable to simply punch it directly into the genitals without significant fallout. Margaret Atwood is probably busy, for one thing. I hear she’s doing quite well professionally. Her advice for growing on Substack might therefore be limited to ‘Just be Margaret Atwood and say so. Then twelve million people will subscribe instantaneously.’ So that rules Margaret out for the moment.

The other valid rebuttal is that there are different metrics of success. And no, that isn’t just something your mother tells you soothingly after you fall face-first into your egg during the under nine’s regional egg and spoon race, resulting in a lifelong phobia of eggs (ovaphobia?). We live in a world of rock-kickers. People are obsessed with what we can measure. What we can quantify, weigh, pick up, turn over in our hands, or fling into the face of someone who disagrees with us. The world quantifies; it will do this for good reason. It’s the easiest and most universal way to conduct the essential work of measuring things. The qualitative stuff is every bit as important but trickier to measure. More amorphous. I’m conscious of this – as is the voice – when I look at the comparatively small but lovely and entirely immaterial thing I have built here with your help. It won’t buckle my knees if I try to lift it. I can’t chuck it at someone in a rage-induced urge to concuss them. It has no shape. No mass. If I reduce it to numbers alone, it can appear insignificant.

In any creative endeavour, there can be an impulse to shrink. Shrink the thing you have created in the expectations of others to pre-emptively insulate yourself against inevitable disinterest or rejection. Shrink yourself after years of absorbing that disinterest or rejection and allowing it to draft and then dominate a story of who you are; to quantify your worth because it’s too opaque, too complex to qualify. There can be an impulse to apologise for your best efforts, or for seeing value in your work before others see it. This is why there is sometimes shame after the joy of creating something. The voice came reeling in yesterday morning, livid as a whisky-drunk bully, stinking up the place with its rancid morning breath and trying to trample the quiet, glimmering sense of gentle progress I felt in the wake of the interview.

I’ve had several emails from other Substack writers since yesterday. Many of them contain a sort of desperate lament which is relevant to more than those of us who devote our time to arranging words into what we hope is meaning and shoving them out into the piranha-infested waters of the wider internet. Essentially, they were writing to ask about shame, and to articulate it, though many didn’t call it by that name. The emails commented on the section of the interview where I discussed believing in the value of your work. Without that belief, nobody else has any reason to see it as valuable, worth their time, or worth their money.

Those other writers were emailing me about ‘the voice’ as it presents itself to them. The embarrassment they feel asking people to pay for, or even read, their work. The grating feeling that it’s ‘cringy’ or desperate to get behind something they’ve made and put their shoulder to it. Hopefully they aren’t hearing my grandmother’s voice too (though I wouldn’t be surprised – the woman contained enough ire to distribute the stuff on a global scale). It’s not just writers. So many of us carry an urge to make or to do something, and experience this urge in painful friction with a sense that the world is either against us or indifferent.

In a culture, family, time or world that shrinks you, seeing the value in your ideas, your work, and yourself is a radical act of power. Insist on that value. Perform it when you don’t believe it until you witness how even the perception of self-belief causes others to respond to you in new ways. Don’t get me wrong – there is nothing worse, or more harmful to creativity, than voracious ego. It prevents us from connecting meaningfully with other people, or with ourselves, and it turns us into solipsists. It both comes from and worsens fragility. I’m not suggesting that we should ignore constructive feedback or become hubristic assholes.

No. I’m suggesting that we work to stop locating our sense of value in a place that is external to us. In other people, or whatever culture or consensus dictates is popular. I’m suggesting hearing ‘the voice’ without heeding it. It is fear, conditioning, self-sabotage. Call it whatever you like, but it isn’t truth. We could always be better people. The work could always be better. The article you wrote, the cake you baked, the painting you made at a beginner’s watercolour class. The world will always contain at least one person who laughs at your backpack, catapulting you back to being fourteen and having hair that never looks clean no matter how often you wash it. The voice will always represent them.

What you make is imperfect but it has value if it’s valuable to you. You can simply make that decision. Once you do, lots of things don’t get easier. The voice doesn’t go away, but you learn to recognise it for what it is. It is you, and it isn’t, so hear it and then do whatever you were going to do anyway. Make what you want to make. Say what you want to say if you have good reasons for saying it. Arrogance is arrogance. Self-respect is something else, and you grant it to yourself. Just wear the backpack. It lightens the load.