Conversations With My Inner Child

I sat down to write my memoir this morning. I had coffee, I had silence, I had two full hours before the workday started. Everything was in place.

Then the voice showed up.

Not a voice like a crazy person hears. Or maybe exactly like a crazy person hears, who knows. The point is, my inner child, that little guy psychologists told us we all needed to find back in the nineties, does not need finding. He's right here. He's been here the whole time. And he is an insufferable little brat.

My inner child will not stand for anything less than exciting. If he's asked to do even a modest amount of unglamorous work, he throws a fit. A full tantrum. He kicks, he screams, he negotiates like a tiny hostage negotiator who took one improv class. And my inner adult, a more recent addition to the family, works overtime trying to get the kid on board. It goes something like this:

"Time to write the memoir," says the adult.

The inner child screams. "But I don't wanna! It's stupid."

The adult tries to be reasonable. "What's stupid about it?"

Sulking now, arms crossed. "Everything."

"Use your words."

"The memoir is dumb. I don't want to write about prison and feelings and all the ways we messed up. It's depressing. HEY! You know what sounds fun? Let's outline a NEW book. Something about theology. Or leadership. Or what if we wrote a manifesto about how streaming services are ruining attention spans?"

The adult shakes his head. "That's what we did last time. And the time before that. We have seventeen chapter outlines in a drawer and one half-finished book about our actual life. We need to finish writing."

"But it's taking forever. And it's going to be bad when we're done."

"That's why we fix it in the edit."

The inner child is immune to reason. "Uuuughghgh, editing sounds even WORSE. HEY! Let's write a newsletter essay instead! Those are short. We can finish one in a day and feel productive without actually finishing the hard thing."

The adult pauses. He's been suckered by this one before. "We do need to write the newsletter..."

"SEE? It's not procrastinating, it's content strategy!"

The adult is losing ground. "Fine, but the essay has to be about the memoir. That way we're still making progress."

The child rolls his eyes. "Sure, sure, whatever you need to tell yourself. Also, have you checked your email recently? There might be something important."

"You said that twenty minutes ago."

"Twenty minutes is a long time. Anything could have happened. A client could need us. The world could be ending. Don't you want to know if the world is ending?"

The adult's resolve wobbles. The child sees the opening.

"Hey, adult Josh, while we're at it, what if we just scrolled Reddit for a second? Just to clear our head. You always think better after a break."

"We just started."

"A preemptive break. It's called self-care."

The adult rubs his temples. "Fine. Five minutes."

The child smirks, his smug little face curling into victory. "Sure thing, adult Josh. Five minutes. Whatever you say."

Forty-five minutes later, I know way too much about a property dispute in rural Ohio, I've read three opinions about a trade deadline that already passed, and the memoir document is still open on my screen, cursor blinking at the end of the same sentence I left it on yesterday.

This happens every single day.

I used to think the problem was discipline. That if I just built better habits, installed the right app, found the right productivity system, the child would fall in line. But the child doesn't care about your systems. He will Shawshank his way out of any structure you build. Block a website, he finds a new one. Set a timer, he watches it count down like a little pyromaniac watching a fuse burn. The child is not interested in your goals. The child wants comfort, novelty, and the dopamine hit of starting something new without the misery of finishing something old.

I know this pattern, by the way. I know it because it's not just about writing.

I spent most of my twenties doing exactly what my inner child does at my writing desk. Get close to something hard, panic, bolt. Megan got pregnant? I proposed, waffled for six months, then left her on Valentine's Day when she was six months along. Got a decent job at a bank? Started stealing from dead people's accounts because building something honest was slower and less interesting than the shortcut. Got arrested? Fled to California and tried to start over, because starting over is always more fun than standing still and facing what you've done.

The inner child running from my memoir is the same coward who ran from Megan, from Sean, from every responsibility that required me to stay put and do the boring, painful work of being a man.

Prison fixed the running, at least the physical kind. When you're in a minimum-security camp in Sheridan, Oregon, there's nowhere to go. You walk laps around a track and you face the thing. But the mental version of the run, the little voice that says "Hey, let's do something else, this is boring, this might be bad when we're done," that voice followed me out the gate and right to my writing desk.

The trick, if there is one, is not killing the child. You can't. He's you. He's the part of you that wants to feel alive and hates the grind and would rather start ten things than finish one. That part isn't going away.

The trick is noticing when he's driving. Because left to his own devices, he will drive you straight into a ditch while telling you it's a shortcut. He will convince you that checking your email is productive. That outlining a new project is creative. That scrolling is research. That starting over is growth.

It's not. It's running. It's always been running.

So now, when I hear the voice say "But I don't wanna," I try to hear it for what it is. Not wisdom. Not intuition. Not my creative self telling me the work isn't ready. Just a scared kid who would rather do anything than sit with something hard long enough to finish it.

And then I write the next sentence.

Most days, anyway. Some days the kid wins and I end up on Reddit learning about property disputes in rural Ohio. But I'm getting better. And the memoir is getting longer. And the cursor is one sentence further along than it was yesterday.

That's all any of us can do, I think. Stop talking to ourselves and get to work.