A number of months back on Twitter, I favorited a humorous tweet that said "I really want to fire the person who writes my internal monologues."

I burst out laughing- I would love to do the same!

Then I started thinking: wait a minute, that person is ME. I write my own internal monologue. Sure, it's influenced by the environment around me--my high school English teacher says "we write what we know." But I get to decide whether I continue my monologue or just hit the delete button.

When I taught a writing class in grad school, I spent one day in the first week talking about a chapter from Anne Lamott's book "Bird by Bird." The chapter I discussed at length? Shitty First Drafts. For someone with extreme perfectionistic tendencies, the idea of letting anything be shitty is anathema. The point of a Shitty First Draft isn't that you let it stay shitty. Writing is valuable in and of itself, but Shitty First Drafts don't pay the bills. No, the point of a first draft is to kind of vomit words onto the page and just start writing. The mess can be cleaned up later.

So what does this tangent on Shitty First Drafts have to do with firing the writer of my internal monologue?

I see the random thoughts that fly through my head every millisecond of every day just like those Shitty First Drafts I told my students to get to know. The thoughts are very real--and so, might I add, are the Shitty First Drafts--but here's the thing: they don't have to be the final draft. I can't delete the thoughts as easily as I can delete the drivel I spent this afternoon spewing forth, but I don't have to let those Shitty First Draft thoughts be the final draft.

I'm the writer. I'm the editor. I can edit those thoughts and decide if I want to keep them or not.

I can't exactly fire the writer of my internal monologue, although writers must be proficient at managing unemployment. And there are days when I would love nothing more than to put my brain out of work for a bit. But my internal monologue writer is also the same girl whose fingers type these blogs out, clackety-clack. This monologue writer is capable of getting paid for her writing by the Washington Post, so clearly she doesn't totally suck.

I doubt I'm ever going to stand in the mirror and look at myself and start crooning love songs into my green eyes. That's not the point of this. I can actually handle the "I SUCK!" shriek-fest melodrama moments to which I am prone. I suck. It's a fact. The end. The thoughts that I find the most frustrating are the constant worries, the doubting, the gnawing fear that I'm not good enough, I'm a fraud, a fake, that I'm never going to make it.

But it's like this afternoon when I was spewing drivel. I stopped writing my Shitty First Draft mid-sentence, and said to myself, "This stream of thought isn't getting me anywhere." Then I just pressed delete and started over.