I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that, if you’re reading this, you’re a proud member of the league of misfits, one of the army of artists and scientists and left-field players that make all goodness in our world go around. But do you know why you make the world go around? It’s not just because of your intelligence and good humor, it’s also because you are fighting the good fight for the truths that make the most sense to you, even if they directly oppose the truths of your parents and grandparents and judgmental dog and snooty goldfish. Because if any essential parts of yourself need to get discarded in order to follow any kind of advice, it’s a pretty good sign that it is the advice that is at fault, not you. Advice is, after all, only an idea to be mapped onto a life; it’s the life itself that truly knows what works out there in the field.

The surprising thing is that it takes a lot of practice for us to remember this. All of us. For some reason, trusting oneself is a wacky idea in this culture, more so for those of us who spend any amount of time getting smacked around by the cacophony of voices in educational institutions and through the media and on the information highway. Truth be told, most days I’m like that little kid who gets a bucket stuck on his head in the original Parenthood movie, running into walls and mewling “helphelphelphelphelp.”

The lucky thing is that about ten years ago, I had kids, and in the face of pursuing things that took me away from my children or affected how I raised them, I suddenly saw those pursuits as separate from me, impositions from the outside world. Most of these I’d taken on willingly, even eagerly, but I’m not sure I bothered to check to see how well they fit. And suddenly, it no longer made sense to pursue an academic career when all I wanted, really, was the title that came with it. It no longer made sense to listen to those voices that told me I should be thinner, nicer, or more organized, those “shoulding” voices that were “shoulding” all over me. This was due in part to the fact that I was just too bone tired to pay attention to anything but the most essential parts of my life, but it was also due to the fact that having kids seemed to wake me up to the noise in my life, as if along with my nascent maternal instincts and wildly fluctuating hormones, my BS meter was suddenly cranked up to the highest detection level.

Talk about a silver lining.

Because that’s when I started to write. I always wanted to be a writer, but I was too tied up in the noise of what that was supposed to mean, what I could do with it, how it would help define me. At first, and for the longest time, I could only take the most halting steps away from these shackling standards, but over the years it’s gotten better. A lot better.

But it takes so much practice, and not just the sort of practice we usually think about when we think about writing, the sitting-down-at-the-keyboard-and-furiously-typing-come-hell-or-high-water practice. We need that practice, but we also need to practice how we think about writing.

I used to think that writing was something other people knew more about than I did. I used to confuse writing talent and publishing accomplishments for authority on the subject of how I should think about writing in general and about myself as a writer more specifically. I devoured the dictates of my teachers in print and in the classroom, but it rarely occurred to me to decide if their words made more sense to me than their prestige did. If an avid Hemingway fan tore apart my lyrical writing, I tore it apart, too. If an intellectual derided my whimsical characters, I scrubbed them out of my stories like a scullery maid going after a floor with hot lye. And because I couldn’t bear to be anything but the ideal student for each teacher I came across, it was no surprise that I wound up not knowing how to be the best version of myself.

So deciding to devote myself to the truth that was my passion for writing was only part of the turning point I had come to. Hours spent in agonizing creative judgment and paralysis helped me to eventually realize that I would need to work on not just the writing itself, but the way I thought about the writing. I would need to insert as much of myself into my writing practice as I would into the writing itself.

This takes a great deal of self trust, something I think I had in negative quantities (if that is at all possible) when I started out. But along the way, I’ve slowly paid attention to certain road signs that keep me writing, and I follow those, rather than the ones I’d cemented to my psyche since childhood (most of which read “Caution!” or “Do Not Enter” or just, “Wrong Way”).

Now John Gardner and Harold Bloom are gathering dust on my bookshelf and my favorite motto, the one I come to again and again, is adapted from The Princess Bride (which never fails to give my elitist self hives when I admit it and inspires my true self to clasp its fists in victory). It goes a little something like this:

Do you remember that scene toward the end, when Wesley hasn’t yet regained his full strength and Prince Humperdink discovers him reclining on Buttercup’s bed? They each have their swords trained on the other, but because Humperdink is such a coward, he falls victim to Wesley’s taunting, and eventually all Wesley has to do is say “Drop. Your. Sword” with enough conviction and Humperdink’s sword clatters to the floor and he allows himself to be tied up. I love this scene, and I’ve loved ever since I saw it at the movies umpteen years ago (and in the countless viewings afterward). The old version of me would never admit this, at least not in writing. She would have been embarrassed that she didn’t love Citizen Kane more, or couldn’t rattle off a list of award-winning independent filmmakers at the drop of a hat. She wouldn’t understand that she is as much Prince Humperdink as she is Wesley, as cowardly and fearful as she is brave and faithful. That she needs to laugh and be reminded that sometimes all it takes to win battle is showing up.

So that’s what I tell myself every time my elitist, judgmental and judging self gets in my way: Drop. Your. Sword. Just knock it off. Drop your sword or your standards or whatever inflexible thing is getting in your way and remember that silliness and whimsy and vulnerability and care are strengths, too, especially if they run deeper within you than a critic of them ever could.