The Rats

In my last post, I referenced “the rats that run through the corridors of your mind,” and I wanted to expand a little bit on this topic;
The rats are obviously not literal. I’m not in some weird cult that treats creative thoughts as rats to be exterminated (horrifying cult concept anyone?).
The rats are your inner voices. They are not the external forces that cause you to believe what you are doing is not worth the time or effort (we will tackle those in a later post). They are the voices within you that you can never seem to chase down, nor can you get away from. They are elusive and unseen until you sit down at your creative space, be it a writing desk or a photo-editing computer, and that’s when they really start to screech.

Once they are whining in your thoughts, they tend to be the only thing you can hear. Their cacophony of cautious warnings and discouraging remarks will almost always give you a serious case of ripping and backspacing- tearing the pages from your journal or holding your ring finger on that oh-so delightful delete key.

And the thing is, the rats think they are saving you! They think they are protecting you from being hurt, from reaching stress level midnight, or from otherwise scarring your beautiful creative mind. They want nothing less of never hearing another criticism again as long as you shall live, and will not be satisfied until they see this goal attained.

Everyone has their own rats. Sometimes, they appear just before the publish button is hit, screaming that everyone who reads will hate it. Other times, they are the warnings directly after a sentence is typed, simply telling you how bad your writing is.

These rats are my worst enemy. I have found that by reducing the amount of people that tend to see my work in its early stages, I have reduced much of the external voices, but only increased the strength my internal rodents carry. I am timid when publishing or even writing that nothing I type has any purpose, and therefore doesn’t need to be written at all.

Here’s how you shut those rats up, at least in my experience; you stop trying.

Stop trying to run away from them by taking a break from your art. Stop trying to drown them out with words of self affirmation, because negativity will always speak louder than positivity, especially within yourself. Just turn around, and set out traps.

They aren’t lethal traps. Because the rats refuse to die. But they will let you grab a hold of the rats long enough to get your work done.

For me at least, these rat traps take a few shapes. First, you must create daily. I am a huge proponent for daily routine. Even if the creation is as simple as drawing to fill a sticky note everyday, eventually that sticky note becomes an 8.5×11 piece of paper, and so on. Don’t make it difficult on yourself. Set a goal that you can easily attain, so that when you reach it you get that dopamine hit we all know feels so good. For writers, it could be 500 words a day. Layups. For music, it could be 30 minutes of playing said instrument, or noodling whatever riff you are working through. Bunts.

Don’t set a goal you can’t attain easily in less than 45 minutes, because then the barrier of entry is far higher, and when you eventually get busy (and you will), the first thing to fall to the wayside will be the creation item on your checklist that you avoid like the plague anyways. Enter the rats once more.

Second trap for me is also about reducing the barrier of entry. I no longer strive for perfection, or even for 95th percentile. I am reaching for a C average; 70%.

I can dive into this another time, but damn is this way of life liberating. Nothing feels better than setting an underachievement goal. If you can do something to 70% of the standard you set for yourself, it makes it far easier to reach for. You will find yourself creating far more, because your standards have reduced from 4.0 to about 2.0 in GPA terms. It is incredibly freeing and allows for more daily creation. Perfectionism Rat silenced.

Thirdly, is stop being “productive” and just produce. What do I mean by this?

Let’s pretend you just sat down to write. The document is open, all your favorite font settings have been dialed in, the tea/coffee is steaming, you are ready to GO.

Then you sniff a little bit and realize you feel a little gross. So you shower. Then you notice your medicine cabinet has been slowly getting more and more disorganized. That organization stretches into your room, which leads to six hours of doing laundry, and there’s no way you are going to be writing with a break every hour to fold laundry, so you close the word processor of your choice and open up Hulu to see what the gang is up to in Philadelphia the next seven episodes.

You have been productive in that day, granted. But you didn’t really produce anything at all. Your brain has tricked you. It doesn’t want to sit through the misery that is thinking, so it keeps you on surface level productivity tasks, like household chores and needless organization. While those things can feel really good, and are necessary towards living a healthy and well-rounded life, they obviously have a low barrier to entry already. That’s not the problem we are trying to tackle here. we are trying to create.

So sit down. Write, draw, play, edit, bake, cook, do a handstand, whatever. Just do it daily. Do it to 70% of what your normal standard is for “good”. And quit allowing your brain to trick you into being surface-level-productive. Create something this way for a while, and see how the rats are doing without their main food; your fear of starting.