I am not a good scholar, I am not a bad scholar

The old Al Frankin/ Stuart Smalley skit. "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me."

You feel bad about yourself in some fundamental way. You judge your writing, your teaching, some essential aspects of your personality, or how productive you have (or have not) been.

The SNL skit parodies a frequently prescribed intervention for such thinking: positive affirmations.

And while positive affirmations are certainly better than negative self-appraisals, they are problematic in that the cognitive habit of rating oneself will perpetuate itself as an option: if you can rate yourself as excellent, good, or good enough, you can rate yourself as horrible, awful, and worthless.

The solution is learning to refuse to rate your essential worth. This is often hard for scholars; we have learned, during a lifetime spent in schools, to rate and evaluate everything we do, to compare ourselves to others at all times, in all ways.

"So, Rich, let me understand this," you say as you squirm in your chair (yes, setting up my own strawman fallacy here, bare with me).

"How am I going to improve as a writer and publish more if I accept myself myself totally," you challenge.

I am glad you asked :).

Engaging in radical self-acceptance does not mean that we don't work to improve, or develop our skills. When we learn to not rate ourselves, we tend to be less defensive about improving ourselves and improving our work. We learn to accept our flaws without feeling flawed.

If we develop a philosophy of total self acceptance, we can also more effectively stay in process and work on our craft as fully as we can. Since my work having flaws and not being perfect is just a part of life, and not suggestive of my worth, I can improve and grow without feeling bad about what I have yet to achieve. 

As one of my clients says, crazy talk Rich. This is crazy talk.

For the next few posts, I am going to explore this notion radical self acceptance in a bit more depth. It is really, really important.

Poetic Structures and Forms In Qualitative Research

Ever hit a random milestone that really means nothing for the quality of your life, but you are kind of tickled by it anyhow? Well, that is how I feel about my article, Poetic Structures and Forms in Qualitative Health Research,  now having been cited 100 times. Something about a triple digit citation count for some of my work that sometimes gets people raising a perplexed eyebrow or looking blankly at me while saying, in a somewhat disingenuous and surprised tone,  "that's cool."

Of course, nothing in my life has changed. I am not a better person/scholar because of it, but that said, I am not less of a person/scholar for not having been cited more frequently.

Hmmm. An idea for one of my next posts.

Five Accountability Methods

A simple list. Five tools, four of which I have explored before, with links to previous discussions. Summer is a good time to consider the role of accountability in your writing plans; you don't want to let it get away from you. I have plans for next week's posts, but perhaps I will explore each of these again soon.

1) Interactive accountability spreadsheet

2) Daily check ins 

3) Reward and consequences (huh, a search of my posts reveals nothing. I have work to do!!)

4) Intensive interaction and trickery

5) A demanding coach, one who you may "fear" a bit 

Lawyer Wednesday: Great article on peer review and legal publishing

Here is a great article that explains peer-review and legal publishing in simple, jargon free way. It is a nice resource for lawyers and other non-academic professionals.

Written bunnies!!

Yesterday, I should have noted that in addition to the kitten and puppy options, you can reward yourself with cute bunny pictures too! Options, are good!

Written Puppies!!!??!!

I discovered something extremely important a few days ago.  The accountability tool,  Written Kitten has a puppy option! I now can write 100 words and be rewarded with a puppy image. I love puppies!

If you are struggling with daily writing, this is a simple reward mechanism you may want to try. I know, its simple, unsophisticated, and campy, but I know people that this has worked for.

And you can see cute puppies!

Flash nonfiction for father's day

For father's day I thought I would share one of the flash nonfiction shorts that I started a few years ago. I have finished about twenty of these over the last year. I just love writing them, painful that they may be. May this day be filled with joy and hope. Fathers, sons and daughters, this day is for you- may this stimulate reflection today.

Dead Friends

Reading Mark Doty’s Dog Years, I realize that some things I will never be able to write about without sounding like a sentimental, driveling, emotionally stunted idiot. Take my dead friends; they deserve the shrine of ink; I know I have, and will, fail them. Even now, writing about writing about them, I am stunted. I am nine years old, I have been punished by my father for hitting my sister; I did not hit my sister.

I look into the center of things, try positive thinking; of course you can, you are good enough, smart enough. Pass the sugar plum fairy a desert grown fig. Ok, take two. Focus on the image. Let the narrative do the work. Show, don’t tell. I play with the buttons on the toolbars. I listen to songs on YouTube from the years they died.

Gil, for instance, died in 2005 of cancer. I don’t even know the type. The image the doctors gave us was this: go inside his lungs, hurl around a bag of rice like you are playing pick-up sticks, watch it scatter. The rice were tumors, course. That is what the physician said- the grains of rice were tumors, of course. Gil died in 2005. That year was a musical wasteland; it was milk toast post-punk and Kelly Clarkson. I am sorry for that Gil.

Greg Bershad died in 1992, I think. Things were a bit better, minus the boy bands; you had Nirvana and The Beasty Boys. I did not even hear about Greg’s’ death until months later.  His number discontented, no surprise from the brilliant artist turned part time junky; I sent a postcard with my number. His mom called: thank God you wrote Rich, you’re the last one who did not know. He died with a needle in his arm.

It is 2011. I sit in my writing chair. My wife is cutting my daughter’s bangs. She must be sitting- she spent too much time out of her wheelchair today- there is no way she could be standing anymore. Tonight is our second snow of winter. When it snows in Tacoma, it destroys the rhythm of the machine.

I try to count the spokes of her wheelchair staring at me from the shadows. I think there are seven, but I keep forgetting from where I started. This happens to me often.

I digress. I digress so I do not fail. I have failed. I will fail. The snow mixes with rain now, three am; everyone turned into unconsciousness. What is sleep? The wasting of life? The rehearsal for eternity? A simulation of that void I so desperately wish to forget?

I search the web for their names. They died long before the craze. They never knew Facebook. Greg never even had an email address. There is one reference to Gil, an obituary: He lived in Chico and worked in organic gardening.  This is all that is left.

I knew I would fail. I walk into my daughter’s room. She breathes just like her mother. I knew I would fail. I sit in the corner, listen to her cacophony. It is all I will ever have.