After yesterday’s post about my lifetime struggle with the Guilt-Gene (a distinctive marker found to be embedded in the DNA of all Mennonites:), a very accomplished, lovely and forever-unnamed friend wrote me to say that her struggle wasn’t so much with guilt, but with confidence…believing enough in herself and what she’s working on to think it’s worthwhile.

Ahhh…yes.

For anyone looking in on said person, you would see a woman with a fierce intelligence, someone well-read and with a great sense of humour and all manner of other worthwhile and amazing characteristics, the sum of which would freight anyone else with an insufferable ego.

Except.

I’ve referred to this lovely book before but I throw it out as a lifeline to anyone in that same position – whether a writer or not – because Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird, provides precise instructions for these kinds of life-sucking forces, whether it’s in the form of Guilt or Lack of Confidence or Fear or Anxiety or whatever your particular nemesis is…

Miz Lamott’s advice is clear: When you slip into this Inner Trash Talk, this means that your mind has picked up the KFKD channel (sound it out people) and you must turn it off. Banish it from your brain. Devil Be Gone!

I have been tentatively practicing this exact thing each morning with my new routine. I haven’t dared to write this down until now, as I didn’t want to jinx it, but the new habit seems to be holding, so here goes. Instead of my three handwritten journal pages each morning, which I have done for over a decade, I am instead writing my book.

There. I said it. It is my way of sneaking past the KFKD channel, a way to start writing before I’m too awake, too conscious and way too critical. Every morning I feel like I stand on a tight rope strung up high in the sky and inch my foot forward, sneaking past the Censors and the Editors and trying to believe; Believe in myself, believe in possibility and believe that what I have to say matters.

And if I stay really really focused those damned radio waves can’t reach me.