On Criticism

I hate criticism. And to paraphrase the Ernest Hemingway character in Midnight in Paris, if its negative I hate it because I hate to be criticized (and who does?) and if its positive it makes me feel uncomfortable and I will hate it all the more. As such, I enter bouts of criticism as though I’m entering a championship match, easy demeanor masking a keyed up tension that’s ready to explode. I have a million little tricks, a billion ways to duck and dodge the reader’s constructive comments, and my verbal repartee with regards to deflection is second to none. It’s not that I hate the people doing the criticism, indeed it is often the reverse, or that I feel any animosity towards their comments, but more that I am a creature of inverted narcissism, always attempting to avoid comments that seem so much better than the work they are critiquing.

            But when the comments are mostly positive, I get the wind knocked out of me, a sucker punch to the stomach that leaves me winded. I’m on the defensive now, my arms protecting my head from the soft battering of vaguely complimentary remarks. It’s so much worse than that negative criticism, because you can’t parry the way you can when everything’s a negative rejoined to your own furious back peddling and reworking. “No, I meant to say X not Y, you didn’t get it at all.” When it’s postive though, I can’t stand it. That pleasurable feeling I get when every someone seems to like my work is then brought down a guilt that I’m taking such pleasure in these compliments, a “Who do you think you are?” moment from my superego, which long ago beat most of the interventionist tendencies from the id.

            So I always enter these things wearily, and today was no exception. And instantly, it is the second dreaded scenario. By the end I was a guilt ridden mess, barely able to stumble through my own poor analysis of my partner’s essays. It was a technical knock it in the first round, Gallagher down and out with barely a fight, a spring chicken against the seasoned pros. …I need to stop reading Hunter S. Thompson.