-Alexandra Kostoulas

In 2009 I went to visit a writer friend of mine who was dying in the hospital.
She had notes to herself written on her white board.

One of them read:  No more negative self-talk.

I saw it and completely understood what she meant.

Recently I have been noticing other writers using negative self-talk. 
I asked a friend and fellow writer to write for a neighborhood newspaper I am starting up. She refused. Not because she was too busy, but, she told me that she wasn’t good at meeting deadlines, and she didn’t want to let me down. I asked another friend to help me run a large artistic project I am working on. He said, “I don’t think I would be right for that. You need a writer who is more well known. Nobody knows who I am.”

In both cases I was the person in charge of the project and I was the one asking. I thought they were good enough. In fact, they would have been great!  I asked another friend to take over the planning for a writers’ night. He looked down and said, “I’m not very good at organizing,”

When I was working full time as a professor, I taught a class at UC Berkeley in Critical Thinking. We read Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” All the students pretended to understand the text and looked confident when I asked them if they had any questions. When it came time for discussion, they were silent. One of my students was a woman in her fifties from city college who was living in a group home after recovering from being homeless. She cried out, “This is so damn hard. I am so stupid. I am a cave dweller. I AM LIVING IN THE CAVE.”

If you have ever read Plato’s allegory of the cave, you will realize that that is the point. We are all in the cave looking at shadows on the wall thinking that it’s real, when there is a whole reality going on outside the cave that we can at times, collectively, distort and choose to ignore.  She was the only person in the class who understood the actual readings and she didn’t even realize it!

Why am I noticing this all of a sudden? It’s as if every writer I am interacting with the last few months has put him or herself down. Myself included.

Negative self-talk is bad because it tells a fiction about who we really are and it limits who we can become.  This is especially damaging for fledgling writers

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