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Sometimes when I write, I wear heart-shaped, rose-colored glasses. Truly: they were $9.99, online. It’s one of the exercises my therapist Jess, who is the greatest therapist in the world, has prescribed to me in order to shift my way of thinking about my writing. And since I’m primarily an essayist and memoirist, when I get hypercritical of my writing, it’s often because I’m hypercritical of myself as a human-in-general. Inside is a dangerous, self-flagellating voice that really serves no productive purpose, yet one that I frequently feed. “Poop-colored glasses,” is what Jess said a few weeks ago. “You see your writing through poop-colored glasses and we need to nip that in the bud.” She instructed me to actually purchase a new pair. And so, this exercise shifting my inner monologue is a tangible one: each time the harsh voice emerges and I become aware of it, I put on my heart-shaped, rose-colored glasses, and this physical act reminds me to redirect my thinking, shift my narrative and actively think something else about myself and my writing through a different lens. Literally. I wore them a few times while working on this piece. * I came to therapy and Jess it after suffering a mental health breakdown (I’m talking walking-into-the-ocean-fully-clothed-not-planning-to-turn-back sort of breakdown). It happened not long after I published my first book, a memoir. Each time the harsh voice emerges and I become aware of it, I put on my heart-shaped, rose-colored glasses. Like most memoirs, Poor Your Soul is a story about love and loss, and I wrote it in the wake of the events: I was twenty-eight years old, got pregnant while on birth control pills, lost the baby in the fifth month of my pregnancy, and married a man I had known for less than a year. My memoir also weaves the story of my mother’s immigration from Poland to America, the adoption of her son Julian from Poland, and his tragic death at the age of fourteen. Poor Your Soul is a book about two women who lost a child they wanted to save. […]
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