One More Word — Day 63

Today I found myself thinking about the critical voice in my head. That critical voice is a combination of all the harsh life lessons that have accumulated in my lifetime. Oftentimes, we learn the hard way. We face rejection, destructive criticism, and failure. Those hard lessons stick in our minds, so the next time we go to do something, there is the voice. “This won’t work”, “This isn’t good enough”, “You’re not working hard enough”.

It got me thinking about the positive life lessons I’ve had. After all, human beings respond to both positive and negative reinforcement. Where are my victories that I can count on, however small? These positive life lessons are vitally important when counter-balancing our own critical nature.

Here is the poem:

Sometimes our life lessons are exciting, mind blowing, when we discover what we love, but other times, the lessons are as hard as asphalt, as bitter as cough syrup,

realistically, we need both positive and negative reinforcement,

but if it’s only been negative for so long, we’ve only learned what not to do,

we need to go find what makes us feel alive. — 63 Words

What percentage of the driving factors on your decisions have been due to negatively reinforced behaviors, rather than positively reinforced behaviors? Have you had a chance to embrace the things that make you feel good, instead of avoiding all the things that make you feel bad?

It’s not easy. In fact, this thought came into my mind from the negative light. I was thinking of my self-critical voice. The voice that tends to chime in each and every time I write something new. I’ve learned not to listen to that voice, primarily because I enjoy going back and reading my old writing. I like to hear my old thoughts and see where my mind was at different times in my life.

Sharing my writing with the world is another story. I can get stuff written, thousands of words a day, but deciding what I want to put out in the world awakens my self-hatred like nothing else. Why do I keep doing it?

That’s simple, because a few people enjoy it. Just a few people reach out and say, “I liked that last poem”. Those people keep me going. Those people make me feel like I’m not writing into a void. They are my encouragement, my inspiration, my positive reason for doing this.

It isn’t just about getting positive feedback from these people. Really, it is about finding people who are thinking in a similar mindset. When my writing resonates with someone, that means they took in my thoughts and related to them. Its a type of connection that I don’t experience anywhere else. I certainly don’t experience it in the dopamine driven social media algorithm. These are real life people, we have real conversations. Whatever the number is doesn’t matter.

The one or two small positives easily outweigh the countless, annoying negatives.

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Day 63 of 500. Increasing my wordcount by 1, every single day. The purpose of this project is to hold myself accountable to consistently share some writing with the world. These aren’t pieces I spend weeks editing and re-editing. Instead, I want to be comfortable sharing some authentic pieces that share how I’m feeling. As I get into a higher wordcount, I believe it will paint a better picture of my mindset and who I am. Thank you for joining me on this journey!

If you like my writing please follow my social media on all platforms @tuckerksullivan, check out my website www.tuckerksullivan.com and consider buying my first book Relate! One Human to Another, which is available anywhere books are sold. Thank you again, for being here.