When you’re a creative soul, you can’t help but be your worst critic.
Can you help when you look back at old stories, poems and the times where you just wrote. You can only grimace by how lackluster it is. Can you help when you’re an artist and your old paintings are hidden in attics or stashed away in storage because they just wouldn’t sell? They spoke to you. Can you help when you’re a performer and the recollection of a past performance haunts you? You cried when you left the stage.
I critique as a way to become better — to unleash creativity that hides in small spaces of my skeleton, the kind that harbors until it is discovered. I critique to feel whole again — to know that I am human and I have something to reach for and find that part of me that needs to grow.
When pen meets paper, when fingers brush keyboards or pencils scratch at old napkins, I can’t help but remind myself of the writer I was and the writer I am and the writer I’m becoming and the writer I’ll never be….
Can I help it when I look back and read what I’ve written and I can’t help but be reminded of my past? And is it my fault that all I want to read is my future?
Moore with Madi 