It’s pretty
amazing the life lesson reminders you can receive while you’re baking! I was
making cupcakes—chocolate ones with orange buttercream. They were for a birthday celebration at my
job and I needed to get them done that morning before I left for work. I had baked the cupcakes the night before and
they looked and smelled yummy and chocolatey.
The buttercream smelled divine after adding a little orange oil. There was one problem, when I went to
actually put the two together and frost the cupcakes, the tops of the cupcakes
were coming off and there was a lot of crumbs in the frosting. I put the cupcakes in the freezer for a while
and then did a crumb coat which helped some but still I could see the brown
crumbs in my beautiful orange frosting.
In the inner critic realm of my mind I could see my co-workers and new
friends disapproving looks, and could imagine them thinking “Hmm…guess she
doesn’t know how to bake as well as we thought.” Just as I was ready to toss
the batch because of all the “judging” happening, that little inner voice I
have come to know as the Holy Ghost said very quietly “That’s not them, that’s
you.”
It was
me who was looking at the cupcakes critically and it was me who was projecting
that reaction onto my friends. It seems
so simple and yet I have done this so many times! That inner critic is
tricky. From crumbs in the frosting, to
the state of cleanliness in our homes, to how we look, the inner critic can trick
us into the thinking that our own inner judgmental thoughts are the judgmental
thoughts of others. When in reality, I
think people are far less critical than we give them credit for. Some of the biggest revelations of my life
were finding out that people I perceived as being judgmental and critical of me
were actually dealing with their own inner critic battles. I am not saying that there is not a problem
in the world with judging people unfairly.
What I am saying is that speaking for my own life, there have been so
many times when I have thought people unkind because of the critical thoughts
that were going on in my own head. In
that moment, the only one who was making unfair judgments was me, towards myself and towards the strangers, friends, and
family who I thought were looking down on me. I don’t say that to put myself
down. I say it because it’s incredibly
liberating. It is incredibly liberating
to know that you have a choice. It is
like the old Indian legend told by an Indian warrior to his grandson, that
there are two wolves inside all of us, fighting for dominance. “Which one will win?” asked the
grandson. “Whichever one I feed,” came
the wise reply. The inner critic is
powerful but we still always have a choice whether we will feed it. We can
choose not to listen.
And so
I finished my cupcakes. I learned a few
things about how to avoid getting crumbs in your frosting for the next time. I took the cupcakes to work and sang happy
birthday to my co-worker and felt glad about this gift of a talent I have in
the kitchen and how it can make people happy.
The inner critic still comes, bringing with it fear of what other people
are thinking about me. And yet, each
time it gets a little easier to hear that little reminder, “That’s not them,
that’s you.” I remember that I have a choice.
I can choose not to listen. I can
remember that we are all just trying to do our best, cupcake crumbs and all.
