Bitch-Slapping Yourself: The Ultimate Mean Girl

But what is worse is that I have spent the previous three hours lying in bed bitch-slapping myself because I'd failed to make apple aspic.  "The Julie/Julia Project," Julie Powell, 2005

I loved that book when I first read it, so fresh.  "Bitch-slap" was all new to me, and "bitch-slapping myself for failing," was somehow so much more descriptive than the tired old "beating myself up."

The Online Slang Dictionary defines a bitch-slap as "hitting someone's face (usually the cheek) with the back of one's hand,"  but Julie and I mean it as judging yourself harshly, privately, and sometimes unrelentingly.  I'm finding it a very useful term.

Last week I had two days of pretty much unrelenting bitch-slapping because I was tired, and all I felt like doing was lolling in my Stressless recliner clicking between "The One Percent" and the Duggars.

There were a million things I should have been doing, my bitch-slapper lectured me.  Clean up your studio! Drag out the novel you finished in 2005 and do something with it! Order pants from LL Bean for Jerry so he doesn't look like a homeless man!  And by the way, why, at 64,  haven't you done more with your life?  Look at Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

I felt completely demoralized.

Then I remembered Julie Powell bitch-slapping herself.  What a dumb thing to do, pointless, even as you recognize you're doing it.

Since then, I've come up with a four-point strategy for disarming my inner bitch-slapper.  I'm trying to keep in mind that:

1.  She (or he) is wrong, as in "inaccurate."  Sneaky-wrong, like Fox News. Not to be trusted at all. 
2.  She is mean.  Really unkind.  She doesn't know the meaning of the word "empathy,"  and she doesn't believe in extenuating circumstances or gray areas.  It's black-and-white, mostly black.
3.  She is not going to listen to reason, ever.  Don't even try.  The most nimble defense lawyer couldn't shut her up.
4.  The only thing to do is to shut her down completely. Flip the switch.  Banish every syllable.

What's been working for me is to imagine taking my bitch-slapping inner voice, sticking duct tape over her mouth, and depositing her in a cell, like she's a sociopath in "Orange is the New Black."  And she's in a cell no one ever checks. God knows what will happen to her. Silenced.

So far so good, although as I write this, I can feel her clawing at the duct tape ("Who cares what you think?  This is woo-woo!")

Onward.