Episode 8: Are You Actually Fixing It, Or Are You Just Creating New Problems?
So last fall, my mom and I were driving back from a little trip to Maine. We’d stayed at an Air B&B straight out of a Stephen King book. Although the property was advertised as a sheep farm, there were no sheep, and the rooms were in the refurbished barn. Yet the owner, who showed up every morning in her nightgown to sit at our kitchen table, still carried her shepherd’s staff. Anyhow, that little story has nothing to do with this episode. I just felt like sharing it because it’s funny, and I use humor as a strategy for countering the doom and gloom of obsessive thinking, which fills your brain with all kinds of dreadful imaginings that definitely belong in a Stephen King book. So my mom and I were in the car, on the way back to Boston, when I played one of my podcast episodes to see what she thought. This was before any of them were published. I wanted to have ten solid ones before releasing them. My primary concern was the volume, which I struggled to get loud enough in my first episodes. I also wanted to know what my mom thought of how I presented my ideas in general—a very nerve-racking question for any writer or artist but particularly a perfectionistic, obsessive one. My mom replied that my podcast was still very quiet. Also, I’d made a couple of errors in speaking, lagged in places, and presented many good points that I didn’t fully develop.
On my end, listening to myself speak, I noticed that I smacked my lips in a couple of places in a way that surely wouldn’t be pleasing for listeners. While the people who made the podcasts I listened to sometimes said “you and I” when they really should say “you and me”––guys, all you have to do is take out the other party and see if the sentence still makes sense––they never smacked their lips while recording. The little OCD Gremlin in my brain told me that, if I didn’t go back and fix the lip smacking along with all the defects my mom pointed out, I’d surely fall into the abyss of Lip Smackers Nobody Could Stand Listening To.
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