The air is heavy this evening. I go out to the backyard with the dog, and I’m immediately weighed down by it, my lungs struggling to expand. Today, we got the kind of rain that intensifies humidity rather than relieving it. The moisture hasn’t left, only grown, and it feels almost solid.

Yes, the air is thick, both with muggy dampness and some crickets chirping a redundant secret message to me.

You suck…you suck…you suck…

I need to give myself the stink eye, try to snap out of the impostor syndrome, but the air all around me might as well be brick walls, so an out-of-body pep talk experience is rather out of the question. (I know, it’s just as unrealistic in the thin air of a January night, but bear with me, the visualization helps a bit.)

Why am I freaking out? I decided it was finally time to move forward with querying for a literary agent for the novel I wrote about a year and a half ago. This afternoon, I opened up that document file, which I haven’t looked at since my last round of revisions a couple months ago, and promptly decided that I hated everything I’d written, and that nobody should ever read anything I write, because then they’ll know that I do in fact suck, so, damn it all. …I’m still trying to shake it off here, but I am better than I was a little while ago when I was staring at my MacBook with such disdain I vaguely considered chucking it across the room. (Never will I ever make that thousand dollar mistake, but I did think about it for just a second or five.)

We’re often our own worst critics, of course. Irony of ironies, the only thing that seems to be pulling me out of my own ass is…well, writing. It’s an important lesson to keep in mind – recognize your fear for what it is, acknowledge the thing that scares you…and then do that thing.

When I complained about my impostor syndrome to a friend, she said to me that if my mother had told me I suck, I’d be plowing right ahead in order to prove her wrong. That was also really helpful (and made me laugh, because it’s true). The truth of the matter is, I’ve already battled the biggest critic I’ll ever know in my life, and won. Not to say that anything following that experience will be a cakewalk; I know it won’t be, and I know I’ll have more of these moments of self-doubt. But, when you’re facing a challenge, nothing is more encouraging than knowing you’ve done it already.

So, it’s time to be afraid, and do the thing. Query letters will go out sometime this summer. I’m determined. Scared, but determined. I would take deep breaths to calm myself, but that doesn’t feel so great with this atmosphere as thick as pea soup…I think I’ll go back into the air conditioning and hope for thunderstorms to help clear the air, and my mind. The good news is, deep down, I know my heart is already on board.