Meet My Inner Child. She F*cks Up Spreadsheets

I hear voices.

The loudest is my inner critic. 

Judging by her chipped tone and incessant nagging, she is a very well-to-do, cold, and proper woman.  My guess is that she was evacuated to a beautiful country mansion where no one would dare show weakness by smiling, frowning, or having bodily functions.

I should imagine she held dinner parties in the ’70s with the London elite and despised anyone who opted for food over a cigarette or was vulgar enough to discuss their ‘feelings’.

I know her as Margot Braithwaite-Smythe. She is eternally 48.

Margot despises fuss.  Actually, she despises unnecessary episodes of any kind, including sloppy dress, sloppy manners, and superfluous articulation. 

Most notably, you would never catch Margot in a flat shoe.

The other voice, less loud but equally as insistent, is my inner child. 

My inner child (definitely an Emma) is a stroppy, messy little gobshite.  She craves attention, loves chaos, and permanently has scraped knees and something indistinguishable stuck in her hair.  She’s a sweet kid, she’s good fun, and big-hearted but my god is she needy.  I’m sorry Emma, did I look in the other direction for 5 seconds?!

I think it’s safe to say Margot and Emma don’t particularly get on.

I (we) have problems with procrastination. 

I find it incredibly difficult to make myself do something that falls into one of three categories:

1)      Boring.  Think life-min, expenses, taxes, spreadsheets, typing up notes, etc etc.

2)      Important.  Think life-min, expenses, taxes, spreadsheets, typing up notes, etc etc.

3)      Non-negotiable. Think life-min, expenses, taxes, spreadsheets, typing up notes, etc etc.

This is the battleground where the war between my inner critic and my inner child really kicks in. 

Margot is all up in my grill, reminding me how useless I am, that if I ‘just get on with it, it will be done sooner’ and that ‘people didn’t get away with shirking such important responsibilities in her day’.  She also reminds me that if I don’t do these things effectively enough, I will be a failure of epic proportion and will likely lose my home, partner, any unborn children, and most certainly fall into some kind of addiction-riddled hovel, where no one will notice if I don’t wash for 6 weeks.

Emma, in the meantime, is ecstatic by the idea of not washing for 6 weeks. 

She is not impressed with my progress at all, to the point that it has caused her extreme umbrage. ‘BORING’ she cries, as she well and truly throws her toys out of the pram, screaming many a blue version of “won’t” (she’s small, but she’s from Dartford), and doing everything she can to prevent any kind of action whatsoever … ooh look, shiny!

Case in point: I have spent weeks battling Margot to build a mid-range programme.  

Despite her constant reminders that I am either doomed to fail, or a best, going to produce something that will bore the belly scales off a goldfish, I have managed to design, test, and tweak my NakedResilience™ Strategy and have started to really get into the nitty-gritty of the programme content. 

It’s fair to say that I am doing well despite the scathing, neck-breathing of my dear draconian friend when Emma suddenly realises that I have been concentrating on this work and not on her.  And my god is she unhappy about that. 

She sets about ensuring that I have absolutely no opportunities to focus on my work and begins sabotaging my spreadsheets by adding numerous excessive columns and spending hours on unnecessarily complicated formulas designed to turn cells slightly different shades of pink depending on the input.

Manipulative little bitch.

So what to do? 

At first I thought I was struggling with my procrastination because of Margot.  The woman can be so bloody cruel.  Getting anything done with her piercing eyes, looming presence, and perfectly manicured Scarlett nails constantly dug into my very soul, is at best, a slog.

And the problem with Margot is there is no pleasing her.  If she’s convinced I’m going to f*ck something up, then she will continually point out my weaknesses until I either crumble or die. 

So I found myself wracking my brains, trying to find ways to get motivated and just GET IT DONE to appease her, but every angle I turn, she swots me down:

-         I’ll reframe it as unimportant – no she says, it very important.  If you don’t get this right, you are a failure

-         I’ll take a break from it – no she says, that’s what lazy people do.

-         I’ll hit it hard and see what comes out – no she says, you’ll mess it up that way

-         I’ll not bother at all then – no she says, only a waste of space gives up like that

-         I’ll pass it to someone else – no she says, what would they think?! Don’t be soft.

It’s impossible.

I sulked off to the kitchen to put the kettle on in the hope that Margot would stay by the laptop, picking apart my grammar and entertaining herself with the general pathetic-ness of my existence, when I noticed little Emma sitting in the corner, sobbing.

‘What on earth is wrong with you?!’ I ask her.  Bless her, she looked at me with those big hazel eyes and she poured her heart out without taking a breath:

“… you don’t see me …

… you spend all your time on that laptop …

… I am scared and alone …

… what if something happens from that work and you never hear me ever again, you barely hear me now …

… what if someone takes you away from me …

… what if everyone thinks I am really stupid …

… what if everyone thinks I am really clever and I have to keep it up …

… and what if , what if, WHAT IF????”

Whoa slow down there, kiddo, you’ll break my heart!

I give her a squeeze and she tells me about all these memories she has of being very small and messing up, and how she always had this feeling that she’s ‘in the way’ and ‘not good enough’.  She tells me that she’s often scared and sad but that no one ever sees or hears her when she’s like that, so she has to throw a strop and stop everything from moving until someone listens.

Hmmm. Now I see what’s happening here. 

I say to her, ‘tell me honestly, did you put Margot up to making this impossible for me so I would sit and hear you out?’.  She gives me a snotty little nod.  

Again, manipulative little bitch.

There we have it, now it makes sense: it was never Margot causing me to procrastinate, it was Emma.

Margot means well, she’s just old-fashioned and sharp.   She uses nagging and criticism to make me pay attention to Emma. Emma’s not loud enough to make me listen to her herself, so I suppose she has to pull strings somehow. Clever girl.

And there lies the magic.  I couldn’t appease Margot because it wasn’t her I needed to appease. It was Emma I wasn’t listening to.

I couldn’t stop the inner critic from making me feel like crap and forcing me to procrastinate because I wasn’t taking the time to understand what the fear was behind the procrastination.

Now I know that when my inner critic steps up her game, there’s something hidden behind. Some fear. Some want. Some trauma. Some desire. And the best way for me to figure out what that is, is to journal, meditate, speak to someone (friend, coach, mentor etc) and figure out the driver.

And you know, now I think about it, it makes sense that it was never Margot.  Because really, how can you be bullied by a woman in kitten heels.

Image Credit: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0590349/ The Good Life: The Wind-Break War