An inner critic rumbles at the back of my throat
My mother is smashing garlic covered in cling film with the short, stumpy wooden object that looks like a mushroom. The bottom is smooth and flat, the top curved to accommodate a hand that will grip and force the weight down. The cling film is there to contain the mess; the splinters of garlic will no longer be launched into the air, but instead will implode without distance and remain suffocated underneath.
Upstairs I’m cleaning my childhood room with caffeine-fuelled intensity, by way of avoiding other tasks (writing this newsletter) and actively searching for totems of nostalgia to sink into, as I am wont to do when I’ve run out of inspiration and the inner critic begins to re-emerge. Chunks of my life are catalogued here. Thick, heavy hardbacks on Robert Browning from university; a dictaphone containing tapes of high-pitched definitions on GCSE biology and a cruelly mis-pitched rendition of Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest word; jewellery tat collected from various different countries; report cards from my primary school written in cursive fountain pen ink.
I read these insights on my childhood self from teachers who claimed to know me. Certain words eject themselves from the page and become inked in front of me: lively, enthusiastic, confident, moody, careless, rushed. Valid criticism for someone who has not yet fully grown into her form. Why then, two and a half decades later, do I feel small again; and dare I say, a little crushed?
Mrs Mitton, a formidable woman who I once rushed up to at the butchers in our village to shake her hand, beaming, aged 4, at least predicted one useful attribute: “In the cookery room, Catherine has shown herself to be sensible and helpful,” she writes.
Criticism is, as the word might suggest, a critical part of life. Without it there is no improvement and without improvement we are simply slaves to history, doomed to repeat it, etc etc. At work we give and receive feedback; in culture, we read reviews; privately, we might pen journals, engage in therapy, ask friends to tell us the painful truth; and failing all that there is always the brutal honesty of family.
A few months ago I found myself in the inaugural session of a writers’ group I’d been asked to be part of. We were reading a short story by a female millennial writer and my first note was not a carefully considered analysis of her language, narrative structure or literary devices, but instead a broad criticism of her entire being. “I’m slightly bored of writers like this,” I said. “They’re all the same and I’m not surprised by anything they have to say.” I regretted it immediately. One of the other writers, someone whose work I hugely respect, kindly rebutted that perhaps it’s a cultural critique that we are conditioned not to find the minutiae of young women’s lives and minds worth reading about. I quickly realised that what I was criticising was not the trope of young, female millennial writers; instead, it was me I clapping back against.
Rushed, careless, moody.
I’ve found that it’s easier to siphon yourself off to avoid displaying your flawed criticism to others. Although I must warn you: this is not a recipe for success.
In the kitchen, I taste critically. But whether something needs more salt, more spice, needs to be tempered with acid, or needs water to help soften the not-quite-cooked, is all a matter of taste. We code our tongues and although they might look the same or occasionally feel the same, they are infinitely, inexplicably worlds apart from one another. My inner critic rumbles at the back of my mouth but not often for the food I cook for myself. I repeat the same actions, the same recipes, tweaking and testing but never taking too many risks; I am safe in the kitchen because it is just me and my inner critic and no one else.
Instead I seal myself inside of it, like the cling film that covers the garlic; the expectations from outside the door become the wooden cleaver that smashes me down, little pieces of me imploding but contained within the three walls and one sliding door of my kitchen.
To be critical requires an internal inquisition but also a mind that is allowed to wander curiously outside its own trapdoor. I embrace the first but reject the second, almost subconsciously. I fear I’ve thrown away the key.
The thing that I cannot circumnavigate is that with criticism comes some definition of goodness. And goodness is all I aspire to achieve, in the eyes of others. Strangely, alone in the kitchen, alone in the world, I can call myself and my work good. But when I let anyone peer through the cracks of the trapdoor, I’m exposed to the blinding brilliance of the world – of others – and that means that they might be exposed to the dull darkness of me. It’s not a pretty perception. I am not proud to express this to anyone. But it’s a criticism of myself that persists and I must take it for all its merits and its faults and find a way to move past it.
A recipe for something good: take three beef bones and put them in a large pot of water, filled with a whole bulb of smashed and roughly chopped garlic. Add a large bowl of soaked dried seaweed, a tablespoon of soy sauce, a pinch of salt and a splash of sesame oil; and let it all come to a simmer before bringing down the heat. Cook on low with the lid on for a couple of hours. Skim the fat from the top if it begins to rise. Taste to season. It should taste like the sea but softer.
Never have I ever experienced any dull darkness from you ✨