THE FEAR AKA THE LOBSTER

(Author's note: I don't know if anyone besides me is going to understand the following post, but we'll see!)

So for the last few days-no, weeks-I've been thinking about/obsessing over/whining the ears off of myself and my dear friends/critique partners about something that strikes dread in my heart at the very mention of it: THE FEAR. You know the one. The one that says: "You'll never finish this draft", or, "your writing sucks," you know, highly unhelpful things like that. Well, the other day, after deciding that I had agonized over it too long on my own, I made the confession to my critique partners: I was scared and I *shudder* NEEDED them. Well, they responded surprisingly quickly. One with tough love that I didn't want to accept but know now that I needed to hear and then another one with an immensely helpful e-mail listing all the ways of how to get over each of my particular fears, which included making a banner displaying what it is you want to achieve and the awesome vlog by Maureen Johnson entitled "Dare to Suck".

And then, it happened. Soon after reading those e-mails and feeling a renewed sense of hope, I went to Netflix, trying to decide on what to watch for my nightly T.V. show or movie, when I saw that I could watch Julia and Julie instantly on Netflix. Well, having loved the movie the first time I saw it, I jumped at the chance to watch it again. As I was watching, this scene happened:


Now you may not think that scene means much, but after I watched it, I came to a very important relization: Julie's fear of the lobsters is just like my fear(s) of writing. Let me elaborate: When Julie puts the lobsters in the pot and they spring back up and she runs away screaming, I compared that to how I feel when certain writing challenges come up, I don't actually spring up from sitting in front of my laptop and run from the room screaming like Julie, but some days it feels like I want to! And (in a scene that's not shown in this clip) when Julie runs from her kitchen she runs to her living room and scrunches up into a ball, shrieking until her husband runs into the kitchen and saves the day. Well, like Julie, I sometimes wish I could run from the room and curl up into a ball and let someone else deal with the whole mess that is sometimes my writing, but also, in another scene that is not shown in that clip, Julie tells her husband that a reader of her blog left a comment that said "Man up, kill the damn lobster. Just take a knife and do it." And that's also when I relized, like lobster, I can't let the fear get the best of me, I have to "kill the damn fear"! So, from now on, to hopefully make it a little less scary, I'll be refering to my fear for writing-related issues as...THE LOBSTER. Might be wierd, but hopefully it'll help me push past all of the self-doubt and all that other crap I've been feeling lately. So here's to you, LOBSTER, and may you die a thousand fiery deaths!!!

Thsnk you and good night, I'll be here all week! :P

~Ella