Emotional Bullshit and Kit Kat Bites for the Artist in You

As an artist slash writer, my worst downfall is me--yeah, I know, cliche, but listen--as soon as I come close to achieving some semblance of success, I shut it down.  I take comfort in the childhood conditioning that deemed me a worthless little scamp, carrying that torch of failure happily knowing I'll never get where I'm going.

Too bad, cause the past is long gone, and so there's just me left, with a big question mark of what to do with the years that remain.  Every now and then, I read a book about one or more of my dysfunctional habits, usually after watching fellow artists or writers outperform me by simply doing.

Emotional Bullshit, by Carl Alasko, is one of those works.  Anything to help, right?  I figured if anything, I could get a couple pointers concerning the worst relationship I have, that being the one with myself.

I got comfortable with the book and a bag of Kit Kat Bites.  Why eat a second-rate chocolate that contains bizarre ingredients like 'wheat flour' when real tantalizing chocolate awaits me?  Well, my head games are rooted in my past and so is Kit Kat.  I remember it as a girl, growing up on the outskirts of a small hick town.  We used to take the ten minute drive by pickup to go to the convenience store and honestly, it was one of my favourite snacks.  It made a nice change from fried bologna on white toast.

Yes, with sentimental value, I enjoyed eating the candy, especially the wafer crunch of it.  Those elements made it satisfying, much more so than the questionable chocolate taste.

Munching away, I dove into Emotional Bullshit.  It's about fear and delusional thinking, how our fat egos make problems instead working with the community.  We blame others for our disappointments and avoid reality as much as possible by avoiding or attacking others.

In my own case, I blamed myself as a worthless female for letting my future go down the drain.  A waste of space.  Why write the stories or paint the canvasses with my ideas when someone else out there already has or will anyway.  My delusion that I was a loser from the start allowed me to avoid the risks required to grow as a writer and artist.

A quick read, EB thoroughly explained this common messed up way of interacting with ourselves and others.  Alasko gave tonnes of examples that showed people screwing up all over the place, but he did it in a way that I felt sympathy and understanding for both sides.

What I took away from it involves seeing me and you or somebody else as partners, whether it be in a marriage or business capacity or on a parenting level.  In our individualistic society, where the ego reigns supreme, this is tough to do.

The book offers a solution called 'constructive conflict'.  At the core, a person's needs, like maintaining healthy communication with loved ones, come before the negative desire to avoid confrontation at all costs including losing loved ones.  We have to learn how to treat all involved with respect, listen, and work together on divisive issues.

I lent the premise to my relationship with creativity, which I deny regularly and then blame myself for via guilt of procrastination and distraction tactics.  Some of us must create things because that's who we are; we have to stop deluding ourselves that we have nothing to offer and get on with it, in whatever capacity our circumstances allows for.

Like the shovel on the cover indicates,  digging away at our own crap is hard work, but it's worth it if you break through the fear and denial of what you really need.  It's inspired me to change my approach!

Emotional Bullshit:  8.5 / 10 - An easy read and quite helpful, it could have been tightened up and summarized in a shorter space, but that might be my own personal taste.

Kit Kat Bites:  7.5 / 10 - For the wafer texture and childhood sentiment, I give it a high score.  It's a tasty cookie-candy which I didn't eat for the chocolate taste.