Riding The Edge
A little self-doubt never hurt anybody
There’s an eclipse happening this Friday (today!) in case you haven’t heard. If you have heard, then you probably know that it’s happening in the sign of Scorpio where the South Node is, which means the theme is letting go.
But it doesn’t actually matter if you know, or even care, that there’s an eclipse today, or what the South Node is, or about the sign of Scorpio because letting go is something we all have to do at one time or another. If we live long enough it’s way more than once.
Because I’ve had the experience of being forced to let go when I didn’t want to I’ve been trying to get with the program, so to speak, and think purposefully about what I could stand to shed right now. I decided the pesky thing, the habit of mind and heart that I wanted to release was self-doubt.
In less than a handful of weeks I will be done with this crazy, spring freelance season and my life will open up again. Instead of just lapsing into a torpor (I’m so chronically tired at this point, I can’t promise I won’t for at least a few days.) I want to use my current clarity about how much time I actually have to write to embark on a bigger project. I really want to do this, maybe even need to, but it also scares the ever-loving shit out of me.
Maybe I don’t actually have that much time and the project will never get done. Maybe I’ll put in the time but the project will suck. Maybe, even if it doesn’t totally suck, no one will be interested and I will have invested all of that time and energy for nothing…
You get the idea. I could spin endlessly on that hamster wheel of self-doubt and get nowhere, which serves nothing and no one except for the little fear gremlin that lives in my head.
Just to complicate matters, however, as I was contemplating throwing my self-doubt defiantly and triumphantly out the window two things happened. One, a co-worker of mine posed a big question to me right out of the blue. To provide some context, this young woman is a total ray of sunshine. She’s upbeat, positive, smiley, and warm-hearted. Her husband seems equally sunny. They have a dog named Mopsy, for goodness’ sake. They’re just sweet, sweet people.
So, we’re at this event being put on by our office and she turns to me and says, “So, the one thing I’m worried about in terms of having kids is, What do I do if they’re, y’know, sad? Like, what is the word for it… emo? I’m afraid I won’t handle that very well.”
It would have been easy to say something glib or be generally reassuring while moving the conversation on to other topics, but she was so earnest. So, I stopped and really thought about it for a moment. Then I told her, honestly, about times when my oldest kid was really struggling with cutting and coming out as trans. How hard it was for him, and for me, and the work I had to do on myself to be a steady, grounded presence in the midst of that turmoil.
Her question arose out of self-doubt, but that didn’t make the question illegitimate or trivial. Sometimes, in fact, the rising up of self-doubt means we’re right on the cusp of something really important.
The other thing that happened this week was that I waded into a conversation online. It was a conversation about transracial adoption, based on an interview with a transracial adoptee about her new memoir. Given my family history, I have a lot of strong feelings about the topic, which I dove right into. After a cursory acknowledgment of the author, I unloaded a whole mess of feelings and words and…more feelings.
None of what I wrote was untrue. It was (mostly) even related to the topic. But I woke up in the wee hours of the morning thinking, Well, I botched that one, didn’t I? The whole point of the book was centering the needs of the adoptee and I went and made the moment about me. Dammit.
Do I have stories to tell that are important? I think so. Was it my turn to tell them? No, it really wasn’t. Luckily, I didn’t manage to derail the whole conversation, but I still went back and deleted some of what I wrote because it wasn’t my time or place.
You might not classify that as self-doubt, but the hot punch of shame that got me in the gut when I first woke in the wee hours makes me disagree. I would also argue that though the shame isn’t useful, a little self-doubt before I dove off the emotional cliff into the comment thread might have been. It might have caused me to raise a legitimate question that deserved a thoughtful answer:
Even if what you’re saying is true, is it necessary or helpful right now?
If we’re practicing integrity then we’re engaging in regular, if not somewhat incessant self-reflection. And if we’re taking any real risks in this life— creatively, emotionally, or otherwise— then we’re riding the line between self-reflection and self-doubt pretty constantly. When locating which side of the line we’re on it’s worth thinking about Brené Brown’s delineation of guilt versus shame. According to Brown, guilt is “I did something bad”, while shame is “I am bad.” Similarly, self-reflection asks, Did I make the right choice? or, What is the right choice?, while self-doubt asks, How long until I find out I was wrong? or even, Why am I always wrong?
Self-doubt presupposes the answer, and thus frames, the question. But on the other side of the thin line from that self-doubt framing is simply an earnest, thoughtful person asking, What should I do? That’s a useful question.
I still think endless spinning on the hamster wheel of unanswerable questions— What if something bad happens? What if it doesn’t work out the way I wanted? What if I’m not who I thought I was?— is a habit worth releasing. But instead of throwing it defiantly out the window, I want to back away from it slowly until I hit that sticky edge between self-doubt and self-reflection. That’s where all the interesting things happen, I think. That’s where our hopes and fears sit right next to each other, watching our dreams take flight.
My beloved fur baby-pooch passed away a few weeks ago. I didn’t feel ready to let her go, she was old and sick so I had to😭, been into the deep meanings of attachments as a result.
Hm interesting 🤔 I guess I would let go of my sense of judgement of how things should be. That gets in my way a lot.