How to Manage that Cast of Critics in Your Head
Encounters with my inner Big Fat Greek Chorus
In the plays of ancient Greece, the Chorus was a group of masked actors positioned on the side of the stage. The members of the group would provide exposition and running commentary on the action taking place. Sometimes they’d dish on the unspoken fears of the characters or tip off the protagonist to a secret insight, and they thought nothing of switching sides in a conflict. They provided a snarky play-by-play commentary, delivered as one coordinated voice.
In other words, the chorus bore more than a passing resemblance to a group of Mean Girls.
Here’s the thing — I have my own Greek Chorus in my head, all the time.
My Big Fat Greek Chorus burst onto the scene around middle school, with a chatty, catty script in hand. It went something like this:
You don’t belong here.
Everyone else is smarter/prettier/better than you.
As I grew older, and middle school dynamics receded, the Chorus managed to stay relevant, providing biting commentary for each new season in my life. To this day, the troupe likes to show up at my workplace to offer unconstructive criticism.
Who are you to be the expert in the room?
You’re really falling short as a… boss/employee/executive/mother/wife/daughter/friend/writer/runner/meditator.
The essential message is always the same: You’re overexposed, at once too much and not enough. You’re making yourself vulnerable. This could end badly.
Despite the fact the Chorus is not meant to play a starring role, it tends to steal scenes. The better part of me takes notice of this performance going south. Aren’t I the main act? And the director? Or at least the stage manager? Why am I giving the Chorus — these two-bit hecklers — all the lines?
But then another part of me considers it selfish to demand the spotlight. Aren’t I better suited in a supporting role? It’s what a good woman performs. And anyway, who wants to put themselves out there to the inevitable bad reviews?
The writer Laura McKowen once described the panic that flooded her after she taped a high-profile podcast episode: “We don’t like to be seen trying. We don’t like to be seen caring. We don’t like to be seen taking an emotional risk.”
This, she says, is real vulnerability. It’s the risk of putting yourself out there and knowing the Chorus — as well as the audience — could hurt you. She notes, “I hate it every time, but I keep doing it, because as much as I hate it, I know there’s no other way if I want to keep doing this work.”
I could turn the Chorus into the antagonist in this story, but the Chorus isn’t really made up of Mean Girls out to hurt my feelings. It’s an act of imagination that is inspired by real events. In my case, the Chorus is a group of highly misguided, anxious protectors who never want me to take a risk because I could be imperfect and therefore hurt.
This is why the chorus criticizes my past, present and future performance. It was terrible, it is terrible, it could be terrible. You failed, you are failing, you might fail.
The Chorus warns of worst-case scenarios, so I will be prepared in case they happen, or it seeks to make me small before someone else has the chance to diminish me. My Chorus sees its job as supporting my perfectionist script, which never has a happy ending.
The judgment of the past is painful because it breeds shame. The judgment of the present is dangerous because it causes me to hedge. But that of the future is the worst because it will stop me from doing anything at all if I let it.
We all have a Chorus of some kind, but they speak different lines depending on our own life’s material. Sometimes the Greek Chorus mimics the voices of our fathers or mothers or bullies or traumatizers. Sometimes it simply echoes our own fears. It channels the negative because it is not a cheerleading squad. It is a criticism machine, and it knows no other way of being.
My Chorus has a lifetime contract, like a wretched group of Supreme Court justices permanently serving on a bench in my brain. These justices are getting a little long in the tooth, so they’re less voluble than they once were. But they don’t retire. They’re still in active service and will remain so as long as I’m around.
As I write, they urge me to play it safe. Nothing too open. Nothing too personal, as that could be construed as narcissistic. They remind me that there are people who will hate my work, and whose reviews will be even worse than their own.
“And in case you were wondering,” they proclaim in unison this very moment, “this essay is no good. Keep your thoughts to yourself.”
Providing notes to my Chorus tends to work about as well as you’d expect, which is not at all. Their creative range tends to be limited to fear, loneliness and struggle. The voices of fear tell me not to take a creative leap. The voices of loneliness remind me that when I stick out my neck, I’m alone. And the voices of struggle whine about the long, hard slog necessary to arrive at any kind of breakthrough. Since they are a bunch of prima donnas on these matters, I find it best to acknowledge what they have to say.
I try to imagine constructive intentions underneath their tired lines. When encountering fear, I tell myself that being afraid means I’m taking a risk to do something significant. This is how truly transforming things happen. When I’m lonely in the work of change, I tell myself it’s because I have stuck my neck out into the wilderness like any explorer must do. It’s the only way to new ground.
When I’m in the midst of the struggle, I tell myself I’m frustrated because great work is a hard, persistent, gritty business. As the Chorus likes to remind me, struggle is not fun and sometimes even downright heartbreaking. But it is when all the important things happen.
Struggle is the heart of change.
This empathetic recasting of the dialog allows me to separate from the Chorus and gently return them to the wings. When I am compassionate to them, they are more compassionate to me. And I suppose this is my indirect route to self-compassion. It’s a triangle, from me to them and back to me. We all get a little kinder in the process.
It’s taken me decades to be nice to myself, to them, and by extension to others. The straight line from my level of compassion for myself to my compassion for the world was long invisible to me. I’d always believed anything short of self-sacrifice to be self-indulgent. But a little generosity to my own soul and the voices in my head is quite the opposite. It’s a gift to my own soul but also to everyone I encounter.
On good days — kind days — I can hear sounds beyond my mental surface noise. It’s a set of signals that operate at a lower frequency than the Chorus, close to my guts and heart. These sounds are not heard but felt, beneath and beyond the voices in my head. This inner knowing summons courage that can take the form of leaping forward, walking away, creating or surrendering. My knowing needs no stage or act or theater.
As a parent, I understand the instinct of my Chorus. I want those I love to know no pain, humiliation or failure, though of course they must if they are alive. They need all of these things to learn how to recover and find resilience. They don’t need to be kept from struggle. They need a safe place to return from the struggle.
I cannot struggle for them. I just have to love and support their own struggle. I need to clap when they approach the stage to slip into their own skin in front of the whole wide world, even if they might get pelted with hurt. The show must go on.
My stepsister is supremely accomplished at anything performed outside — biking, climbing, hiking. My stepfather described once watching her scale a mountain, caught between pride and a desire to call out to her, “Get down from there!”
I understand, having been on both sides of that desire. I’ve been the one with a tenuous foothold in a new challenge, moving upward, as the Chorus wails at me to descend, and I’ve been the parent, fretting like a Chorus as my progeny hangs from a ledge. I want them to come down, and at the same time, I want them to say to me, their over-protector, “We appreciate your caring. And now I shall proceed, onward, upward, or away.”
Love is about letting all that happen, come what may.
I don’t begrudge the Chorus for its longevity. If the Chorus disappeared tomorrow, it would be a sign I’m not doing anything daring or new. And that is not how I want to live.
Most of my regrets in life are of inaction, when I allowed the Chorus to move from accessory to accomplice and scare me off the stage before I had a chance to fail. Or when I let the critics chase me into the wings when my performance stumbled and things got hard — and they always do get hard. I try to stay on the stage and give it another go, time after time. Even if, like Laura McKowen says, I hate it every time. Even if the Chorus is there till the very end.
I don’t know how I will die, but I imagine the Chorus won’t miss the big event. Its members will watch me take my last breaths and sigh in unison, “Is THAT how you’re going to go?”
I will respond, Why yes, and thank you for your long-standing service. And then I will take a bow, not for them or any other audience, but for myself, for all the times I showed up on stage.
