Overwhelm

How To Generate Overwhelm:

In your head, make a big pile of vitally important stuff to do.

Identify with the belief that it must be done,
sooner than possible.

Put all your attention into imagining the scary future.

Focus on what you don't yet know how to do,
keeping in mind that it is essential to know
what you don't know.

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A longtime client deep into revisions of her first novel gave permission to share this.

Hey Jude,

As you know, every time I hit a big place in my book
where major re-writes are needed, I start to feel overwhelmed,
like it is too big a task for me and that my book is shallow.
I get very muddled in the head and can't think clearly.
I am not giving in to this old voice as much as I used to,
but I would really appreciate a word or 2 of encouragement
from you as I contemplate how to change and deepen these chapters I am on.
Thanks very much!

Marilyn Wolf
Greensboro, NC
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Dear Marilyn,

More than a word or 2, here's a whole blah-blah-blah.
I hope some encouragement turns up in the mix.


Seeing Through Your Trickster

How wonderful that you recognize
the habitual and illusory nature
of the Voice of Overwhelm.

What a key to freeing yourself from it!

However often it shows up,
repetition doesn't make it true.


Distracting Yourself From Distraction

The notion of your book being shallow makes for a potent distraction.

Sometimes I've been able to cut through this kind of fearful story
with the following magic question: So What?

Even if everyone who reads your book pronounces it no deeper than a puddle
(impossible because I've been reading it and don't think that at all)
what would that have to do with you, with who you really are?
It's up to them what they think, how deeply they experience what you've written.

As Martha Graham famously observed,
it is not our job to decide whether our work is even good or not.
Our business is keeping the channel open.


Or, Pay Attention to the Distraction

What really distracts from the work at hand
is not just an evaluation like my-book-is-shallow,
but our resistance to it, our effort to push it away.

Allowing it to be here, since it is,
and even exploring it with sincerity,
may offer rich learning.

What if you opened to listening
to the dread criticism as if it were a friend?

What might you find yourself writing
if you had zero fear of its being shallow,
if you fully accepted that possibility?

Maybe more shallowness, a lightening up,
is actually just what your book needs at this juncture.


Or, Just Stop

Your stamina and perseverance are only some
of your amazing gifts in this process.

But it is also good to give yourself a rest sometimes,
to let things rearrange within you
without shining a flashlight on them all the while.

Then a deepening seems to happen of itself,
without efforting or willpower.


The Comfort of Familiarity

As you said, this is a familiar place.
Maybe it's innocently offering you a point of reference,
an old structure to cling to before you jump off into
the unknown and uncharted of what's next.

You wrote about it another time:

"I feel completely daunted and weighed down
by the idea of trying to deepen these chapters.
I think it is because I feel like
I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO IT !
That old feeling of "who in the hell did I think I was
to believe I could write a novel" has crept back over me..."

I wrote back:

I see "I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO IT !"
and I wonder if you've heard you.
Big letters seem like shouting.
I think I usually shout at myself when I'm not listening.

Of course you don't know how to do it!
Honestly, every time I get that myself,
it turns out to be such a relief.

We don't do it. It comes through us, or not.
It's a surprise, and we're not in charge of it.
All our efforts to get what comes or doesn't
to reflect well or badly on our poor little egos
just amount to nothing.

Who did you think you are
to believe you could write your novel?
Who did you think you are
to believe you could breathe, for that matter?
(It's happening, whoever you are!)


Encouragingly,
Jude