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The Impersonator in the Mirror
“It was good!” My girlfriend lied. “I really liked it!”
How could she keep a straight face, telling me this? She’d read my most recent piece of writing and I knew it was bad, knew she was just being nice.
I waved my hand in the air. “Eh,” I grunted. “It sucked.”
“Oh, I thought it was good,” her eyes dropped. “I’m sorry, I guess.”
She was being serious. Because of course she was. Why would she lie to me and why, after more than a decade of creative writing — getting publishes, fellowships, grants, and awards — would I start to be terrible that day? I wasn’t terrible. My piece was fine. I was being an ass.
The look in her eyes broke my heart. I ran across the apartment to her and apologized. Why was I doing this? Often I can be self-deprecating but I bulldozed straight past that and into genuine self-loathing for no good reason. All I could say, over and over, was that it was a defense mechanism.
Writers have a ton of anxiety but, as an overarching concept, there is such a thing as creativity anxiety: people who think creatively stress out about thinking creatively. You fear rejection, mockery, indifference. You fear that your work is bad compared to everyone else’s or even to your own.
