Do Our Brains Need Us to Be Nice To Ourselves to Thrive? Can I Fix That in Mine?!

DOES ANYONE ELSE HAVE A LOUD MEAN GIRL IN THEIR HEAD??

I recently completed an 8 week writing seminar where they send you a daily prompt and set you up with a partner (that rotates weekly) and you write twelve minutes off the prompt and email it to each other and you and your partner give each other ONLY POSITIVE FEEDBACK. Before I started it, I thought it might annoy me because it’s so imbalanced- I’m used to asking for negative feedback, critique that will help me improve my work…but with this daily exercise, I increased my new novel’s word count by 20,000 words in eight weeks (which is a ton for me)! I went way over the twelve-minute mark daily, obviously, as I was feeling encouraged and joyful about what I was working on. I realized that this is a first, rough draft- it doesn’t need to be finessed yet, it just needs to be finished. And to do that, I need to believe in it, and in me. And to do THAT, I need to be hearing nice things- ideally the nice things would be coming from inside my brain, but that’s never how my brain has worked, so this really worked to have other people reading my shit and giving me love about it. It felt like being cuddled and pet every day for a month and a half. My writing is the most ME, the most vulnerable, crucial way I share my insides, so when people read it, and even…