Wiggle Room !

An Excellent Idea

Ahhh. Exhale! Wiggle room! So comfy and weightless and loose like your favorite perfectly worn-in t-shirt.  It’s not “valuable”–not in the way of your diamonds–but you definitely want it.  Imagine if someone were to ever throw that shirt away, ((shudder))– there’s gonna be a…problem, right? But, the far likelier situation, with something like our wiggle room– which isn’t even a thing at all – is that it’s usually an inside job. As in, it’s us giving away our own wiggle room, and yes, creating a problem for ourselves. Unwittingly, of course.

The good news about it being an inside job is that we can wriggle back that wiggle room!

Little reminder: my intention in these substack missives is to say hello, check in, and offer a little encouragement from one creative to another. Then, refreshed, we can all make imperfect progress toward creating a picture book world, IRL. Not to sound alarms, but it really is time. Seriously.

Yet, I’m over here talking about silliness, dilly-dallying, and dropping balls, and today, wiggle room. A person close to me ‘joked’ that it sounds like I’m actually encouraging everyone to be a slacker so, at long last, I would have permission be one too.

Haha…sort of…but no.

Slack? Yes – definitely cut yourself some! I’ll have some myself, thank you very much. And what is slack but a little wiggle room?  Slack-ER, though? Nope. We’re doing lots and lots of creating here.  With wiggle room, of course.

Okay! Onto wriggling back some wiggle room from ourself for ourself! What a tongue-twister.

WHY do we get ourselves into these twisters?

I know, right? Don’t feel bad. It’s not you.

Wait…you just said it was.

Well, it is. And it isn’t.

Your creative human self, the one filled with your creative rocket fuel (read more about that here) shares space in you with your Inner Critic, that hench(wo)man of the not-so-picture book world. It’s taken up residence to inform you–morning, noon and night– that YOU ARE NOT CUTTING IT. And, it has a smarmy way of convincing you it’s telling you all this for your own good –it just wants to see you get ahead or to save you from humiliation or financial ruin, etc. etc, ad infinitum, all while sprawling out in there, tsk-tsk-ing over your thick dossier of FAULTS. Worse yet, it does so while snacking on your wiggle room and swigging your creative rocket fuel.

OH NO. WHAT do we do??

We wriggle back our wiggle room, a little at a time, over and over.

What?? THAT’S what we do?

Yes. We’re going to hoist the Inner Critic with its own petard– using its own tactics against it. I’ll get to that in a bit. First, a little more about what is happening, and why.

Notice that Inner Critic is snacking on your wiggle room and creativity, not on your diamonds or Gucci slides. Why?? Well, because if it were the other way around, you’d TAKE ACTION and immediately, you’d forever after track the Inner Critic’s movements, and would be vigilant about protecting your valuables from it.  

The not-so-picture book world and Inner Critic know that our wiggle room and creative rocket fuel actually are the REAL valuables. But being wily, they have us convinced that a little wiggle room is nice, but not important, more like a silly extra thingie. Only important to those slacker types. (Aside: Silly is sanctioned in a picture book world).

However, despite it’s silly-sounding name, wiggle room is also known as:

Relief. Flexibility. Mercy. Grace. Options. Opportunity. Liberty.

Oh. Now those, we’d protect. We might even trade a few diamonds for them. “What is possible?” we wonder. Which, it just so happens, is the clarion call for creativity.

And, now, the hoisting part – what to do in the face of the Inner Critic. We take a little, under-the-radar creative action, despite it’s compelling presentation of your faults and weaknesses. Like this:

Inner critic: You can’t write poetry…you haven’t had a poetry class since…never!… also you don’t read real poetry...when was the last time?… be realistic… fine, but should get a PhD, so you don’t embarrass yourself …. yammer, yammer.

You: I’m just jotting down a few lines.

IC: Those are terrible!

You: I’m a beginner. We’ll see. ( As you continue to jot.)

Lastly, keep track of the times Inner Critic was wrong. Especially times it was dead-ass wrong. Pardon my language, but sometimes you need emphasis. (Also, you’ll notice Inner Critic doesn’t hold back, so... no guilt.) Recall something it SWORE up and down that you couldn’t do. Yet you did. That is enough to wedge wiggle room into Inner Critic’s KNOW IT ALL scare tactics. Because it really does not know it all. It just thinks it does.

And that’s all we need to do. Over and over, doubting the Inner Critic, wondering what is possible instead, and then setting about making it.