There is a part of my psyche that I call The Girls in the Box. It’s an imaginary box (originally, it was a black box) that I discovered in therapy that holds younger versions of me, particularly from traumatic and stressful times.
While I call them The Girls in the Box, it probably also fits the Jungian concept of the Shadow. The Girls in the Box are the parts of myself that I’ve cut off because at some point in the past, in order to survive and continue on, I thought I needed to abandon them. And the reason I suspect they were abandoned is because I didn’t think they were good enough or they didn’t fit the mold of how someone else thought I should exist in the world.
These are the past versions of myself that didn’t look the way I thought I was supposed to, that said too much or didn’t say enough, that showed any type of imperfection. And they got voted off the island, or shut away in the imaginary box, because I was obsessed with being good. I thought the only way to live without pain and discomfort was to try to be perfect and good – to be what everyone else in my life wanted from me. If I could just create new versions of myself that were externally valued, then I would feel valued and insulated from pain. Except that really didn’t work, because not meeting the impossible standard of perfect turned out to be pretty effing painful.
Before spending time with The Girls in the Box, praise from the outside world meant everything to me (and some days it still does – unlearning doesn’t happen overnight). My entire self-worth depended on what other people thought of me or how well I met their needs. What made it worse was that the need for external validation didn’t only apply to me the person. It also applies to my work.
The hardest part of being a creative and trying to make money from the work I create is not the making. It is the sharing and promoting of the work, especially in a world where everyone has a microphone. I have a lot of shame around this, because the internet makes it appear that this is easy for everyone else and that selling is a type of magic. I’m sure it’s not that way, and I’m positive that marketing and self-promotion is hard for lots of other people. The shame is a liar and makes me feel like it’s just me and that I’m not worthy and my work isn’t worthy.
Because that’s the real lesson of The Girls in the Box. By listening to them and – most importantly – approving and believing their stories, I start to become whole. I’m learning to allow ALL of the parts of me to come to the table, as corny or as self-helpy as that might sound. Being whole is far more interesting, rich, and layered than striving for perfection.
And that’s where this also applies to my creative work. If I can accept that all of me is valuable and worthy of love, simply because I exist and not because of any external measuring sticks of goodness, then is it possible to believe the same about my work?
What if we are allowed to promote our work simply because we put energy into making it?
The part of me that is still unlearning that goodness is a type of currency prickles at this idea. “The work isn’t good enough,” is a special kind of asshole voice that quickly shuts down sharing. Or another one that haunts me frequently is, “It costs too much, so why bother putting it out into the world? No one will want to buy it.” But if I listen to those voices, my work ends up like The Girls in the Box: abandoned and hidden.
My hope for this year is that sharing my work does not depend on how anyone else feels about it, or really even how I feel about it. It doesn’t have to be good to be worthy of being shared. If time was given to making it, that makes it valuable.
This is what I want most for all of us: that we can trust ourselves above anyone else and then believe that our work matters and deserves to take up as much space in the world as we do.