Jay-Z is just about the last person on earth that I would take advice from. Normally. However, today is a day where I need to brush my shoulders off in a most excessive way. Ladies is pimps too, go on brush your shoulders off. Ladies, I encourage you to get that dirt off your shoulders right now. Go on, do it! If Jay-Z can do it, if Barack Obama can do it, you can do it too. Whether I can do it is open to debate.

My shoulders are dirty due to a particularly stinging writing workshop I attended last night. “Attended” is the wrong word. It was more like a roast where I was the guest of honor, but the kind of roast that is performed in dingy basements with no intention of honoring the roastee. A workshop critique involves having the entire class read your essay the week before and write you a scathing letter about what’s wrong with it, then tell you all at once to your face why it’s garbage while you remain silent, nodding your head as you’re told things like “I don’t trust or believe you” and “clearly you have no sense of right and wrong.”

To be fair: the critiquing process contains a short time allotment for positive comments. When the professor says, “Let’s get the ball rolling on Jamie’s essay – who’d like to tell us what’s working here?” and you’re met with ten seconds of deafening silence, you know the impaling is about to begin.

I’ve been participating in these masochistic exercises for years, and today I will try to brush my shoulders off for exactly that reason. If I couldn’t stand the heat, I would set the kitchen on fire and flee into the night. But I keep coming back for more and the criticism continues to straddle my shoulders like a 500 pound gorilla. How do I begin brushing my shoulders off when I have to reach underneath the gorilla’s hairy legs to even locate them?

What can you, or I, or anyone do when something we’ve produced is roundly criticized? One girl who particularly rankled me almost got a scathing e-mail in her inbox this morning. Thanks to Goddess that I realized this was an unprofessional way to deal with criticism. But really, I’ve never felt more personally attacked, though I’ve been through the workshop wringer and back many times. Her specific comments keep running through my head, a background of incessant and degrading chatter that will likely follow me around for at least a few days. My tongue is bleeding from so much biting.

This article on womensmedia.com asserts that women don’t deal with criticism as well as men due to social mores instilled at a young age. Boys are encouraged, says Pat Heim, to participate in competitive activities in childhood which lend themselves to criticism. Because one athlete or team wins over another, boys learn that a nice pummel to their self-esteem is meant to improve their performance, resulting in the ultimate goal: winning. Girls, however, are less likely to play sports or engage in competition; thus when they begin to hear criticism they take it more personally because it is not given under the guise of guidance.

This model may have been relevant to previous generations, but my sister, friends and I all played sports growing up, and my daughter’s friends are beginning to do the same. And yes, striking out in the softball league championships to end the game and brand my team as the losers hurt. Second place medals made me cry because they came attached to a colorful ribbon of failure. I wasn’t the best, and that was about the same as being the worst. Upon reflection, it seems that competitive sports might make a girl or boy feel intensely inferior. Maybe I was just a weird kid. I brushed my shoulders of that softball sting long ago, but the memory is still so accessible.

I want to tell you how to brush your shoulders off. It may be more likely I need someone to tell me how. But, you should hunt for truth in a critical remark. If it’s there, it turns the criticism constructive, which you can take and weave into your work or your life. Cut-downs that ring true sometimes hurt the worst. Then again, disparagement based on false pretenses is often more maddening because we feel the need to correct the flamer’s assumptions.

A lovely mermaid had this to say: “To avoid criticism: Do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.” The more you embody nothingness, the less anyone can find to say about you at all. I don’t mean that in a Buddhist sort of way, though nothingness does have its own spiritual value. I mean it in a “well, at least you had the kahones to do, say or be something” way. No matter how wrong you might be (and you’re probably not as wrong as you think), you inspired a thought, comment or action. You exist and your existence is meaningful. The mermaid also told me to remember the positive, which I often do not. My workshop critique did spawn some positive comments, though I forgot what they were in the face of my own negativity.

So here’s me, carefully wrapping up those charged critical comments with a nice bow, nothing too flashy though, and tossing them out the window. Cliché? Yes. Might I actually do it? Yes. It sounds so therapy-ish, but when I go home today I’m going to write down on little scraps of paper the really knife-twisting comments. I will package them and then do something destructive to them, like setting them on fire. Oh God. I’m fighting fire with fire. Maybe I should just brush my shoulders off after all.

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