The Tale of Mean Monica

On befriending the inner critic.

My inner critic is named Monica.

Before I go further, I’d like to take a moment to address anyone named Monica — your name is lovely and I mean it no disrespect.

Said critic is named after the person who teased me in middle school. She sat next to me in class — an unfortunate gift of assigned seating — where she spent most of the day hissing in my direction. Monica had a lot of thoughts (none of them kind) about my hair, my outfit, the passage I read aloud. She was the first to alert me that my eyebrows kissed in the middle and that a layer of fuzz resided on my upper lip.

“Nobody likes you,” she’d say, matter-of-factly. I had no evidence to the contrary, so I believed this to be true.

How Monica regarded every item I wore in 1996.

I wish this story had a redeeming conclusion, where Monica eventually came to know my sparkling personality, realized her words were damaging, and offered a heartfelt apology. But this was sixth grade — not an after school special — and no such thing occurred.

After one dreadful year together, I transferred schools. (The move had nothing to do with her, but provided a welcome escape nonetheless.) On my last day, she presented me with a giant card she’d made, signed by the whole class. “Good luck! I’ll miss you!” she scrawled, in huge, bubbly letters. The ironic thing is she probably did.

We all have some version of it. The little voice that pipes up, thrilled to contribute an unkind word. An inner critic, a judge, a naysayer. The shadow self. Imposter syndrome. Fear. Doubt. Many names for what essentially boils down to one thing.

The inner critic isn’t kind, but it isn’t evil, either. It just wants to keep us safe. It wants to protect us — from rejection and failure and pain — by pointing out every potential stumbling block. Unfortunately, its best suggestion for how to remain comfortable is to not try. And that doesn’t leave much room for living.

The critic gets in the way of acting courageously — or sometimes, even acting at all. It stands in the way of doing, showing up, authentically being. Mine is ruthless. It speaks loudly and with authority, and it demands to be heard.

But when I really stop and listen — not heed its words, but rather try to understand its source — I’ve discovered it isn’t my voice that’s speaking. It’s Monica’s. Or else it belongs to an ex, a former boss, a family member, a person who once snubbed or insulted me. The words are familiar, but they aren’t mine.

It may sound obvious, but that has been the most liberating discovery. Because though the voice may live inside me, it isn’t of me. It’s the collected fears (and shame and embarrassment) I’ve picked up along the way, none of which are inherent to my being.

It isn’t part of my inner guidance. It doesn’t know best. And I certainly don’t have to follow.

Whenever the inner critic rears its mean little head — just before making a speech, in a fluorescent-lit dressing room, and all the other places where feedback is so not welcome — we have a choice.

We can try to ignore it. Or we can respond.

Lately, I’ve taken to interviewing Monica like a documentarian digging for truth. “Why would you say something like that?” I’ll think. “What is this really about?”

I always get an answer.

Sometimes acknowledging the voice is enough to make it go away. Like a petulant toddler, it just wants to be heard. It doesn’t really care if you believe. (It also helps to re-cast it as someone who patently doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Like, for example, an eleven-year-old who speaks with very little authority about your value.)

The thing about an inner critic is that it has no knowledge of the outside world, because it doesn’t live there. It doesn’t have to go to bat. It heckles you from the cheap seats because it’ll never know the glow of the stage lights.

I read something recently that said the world is shaped by our expectations. If you walk into a party thinking everyone won’t like you, versus walking in believing everyone is a potential friend, that will directly impact your experience. If you expect people to be helpful and generous, you are more likely to recognize when help and generosity are on offer.

Monica expects the worst from everyone, and she doesn’t want to be my friend. But I’m open to it. I told her I’m always listening — with curiosity and without judgment, trying to understand her point-of-view.

The weird thing is, the more I listen, the less she says. Maybe one day soon I’ll get a giant card that says, “Good luck! I’ll miss you!” Here’s hoping.

Card of the Week

Here is this week’s card for the collective, as well as some thoughts to carry into the days ahead. As most modern readers will tell you, the tarot is not about fortunetelling, nor is it about neat, definitive answers. The cards are simply one path to reflection, a way of better knowing ourselves and others through universal themes. If this reading resonates with you, great! And if not, no worries. Take whatever may be helpful and leave the rest.

Featuring The Modern Witch Tarot Deck by Lisa Sterle

One of my favorite things about studying tarot is when cards you previously hated become wise and welcome friends. No one pulls the Ten of Swords and immediately goes, “Yay!” Because, I mean, look at it. But I no longer respond with dismay.

This card is a validating sight — like when you tell a friend a story about something that made you feel awful and conclude by asking, “Is it just me?” And your friend confirms that no, it’s not just you. Those feelings are justified.

If you look up the Ten of Swords in one of those little white booklets included with a deck, it will say something like, “impending disaster,” or “doom,” or “an inevitable end with no hope in sight.” Which, in addition to being super rude, isn’t quite accurate.

The ironic thing is that reading such an interpretation would usher in exactly the kind of thinking that this card is all about.

The character on the Ten of Swords is a fatalist. At the first hint of complications, they can’t help but fret that disaster is on the horizon. They’re so full of worry, so convinced that things will go wrong, they’ve likely turned situations into disasters by the sheer force of their will.

This card follows the Nine of Swords — in which we encounter a person in the midst of a sleepless night, gripped with panic. The Ten of Swords speaks to the proverbial morning after, when they’re exhausted as hell and forced to conclude all that anxiety didn’t do anything to help.

Whether or not we tend this way, we’ve all been there at one point. When you care about something, it’s human nature to hope it works out — and to feel concerned that it may not. The Ten of Swords speaks to the times when this goes too far.

The scene shows a person who has been pierced by not one (or two or three or seven) but TEN swords. That is a lot of swords. I’m not much for dueling, but if you were hypothetically looking to swashbuckle with an enemy, you would only need one sword to get the job done. Employing ten would be overkill, not to mention a waste of resources.

The Ten of Swords speaks to those times when we catastrophize. When we dwell in the negative. When we ruminate ourselves into a tizzy. As swords are the suit of thoughts and intellect, the person on this card has been ravaged not by literal swords, but by thoughts. Sharp thoughts. Thoughts that have become weapons.

This version has the added detail of the character staring at a phone, which is all too appropriate at a time when our devices are so often the cause of unnecessary suffering. Doom scrolling is the mental equivalent of stabbing ourselves over and over again, then wondering why we hurt.

The card also contains a much-welcome reminder written across its base: EVERYTHING IS FINE. Please note it does not say “everything is perfect” or even “everything is great.” It’s unrealistic to expect all things to skew good or bad at any given point. But as we live and breathe, and the sun shines somewhere overhead, “fine” offers us a place to land.

The Ten of Swords is here to remind us that our thoughts have power. Intellectually, we know this — it’s routinely offered up by manifestation coaches and motivational speakers and peddlers of toxic positivity. But in practice, our thoughts still run amok. This card tells us it’s not so much a matter of swapping or replacing our thoughts with different ones. It’s about learning to recognize the thoughts themselves — as they happen — along with the ways they hinder us.

When this card appears, it says we have come to the end of a cycle. Our current way of thinking has run its course. It is time to begin a new one.

Reality may not be ideal. But in this moment, what soothing words can you offer up to your mind? What action can you take, or element can you focus on, to lead your thoughts down a different path?

The thing about loops is that they go round and round — until we decide to get off the ride and take a step in a new direction. Pondering this, I was reminded of the following poem, which says it perfectly. For now, and for the days ahead, I leave you with that.

I Worried
by Mary Oliver

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?

Finally, I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.

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