MABEL: Today I finished one review, and I’m about a half-hour from finishing another. These are the first pieces of journalism I’ve completed in a long, long time–much too long. They terrified me. I honestly didn’t know if I could do it anymore. Finishing these (incredibly everyday–they’re book reviews for pity’s sake! the easiest source of journo cash!) two things made me confront one of my deepest fears. (Not actually joking, there.) I’m afraid of becoming Mabel.

Mabel is a character in Alice in Wonderland–or rather, Mabel is somebody Alice thinks about. I can’t remember exactly, but I think this might be when Alice has grown very large, as a result of eating the EAT ME… cupcake, is it? Anyway, Alice tries to remember various bits of schoolchild lore, and keeps getting them wrong: How doth the little crocodile/improve his shining tail, instead of How doth the little busy bee…, and so on. (This is all from memory, so don’t bite me if I’ve gotten some details wrong.) She keeps misremembering, though. Twinkle twinkle little bat/How I wonder where you’re at/Up above the world so high/Like a tea-tray in the sky. For example. And she suddenly starts to fear that she is turning into Mabel: the stupid girl in her class, the one who could never get things right.

Oh man. I constantly fear I’m turning into Mabel. On some level, I know–and this is maybe one of the most important things I really do believe–that no one’s worth is determined by her intellectual prowess. But as a matter of everyday fear, becoming Mabel is one of my biggest terrors. I would say it ranks second in my personal Madame Tussaud’s Gallery of Horrors, right after being somehow intrinsically unworthy of salvation (that beautiful collaboration of pride and despair–I am so special that the forgiveness extended to Saul of Tarsus can’t reach me! I am the Mary Sue of sin!). I hate being wrong. I would rather embarrass myself by failing to have an opinion at all than risk being wrong. (Yes, this clashes with my exhibitionist streak. Hence the blog.) I can’t even estimate how tall someone is, or how many people there are in a room, because those measurements offer an objective standard by which outsiders might figure out that I’m wrong. My inability to judge measurements is slightly pathological–I have resisted guessing how many people were in a room when I could have counted on my fingers. Because what if I say fifteen and really it’s fifty?

Anyway… I’m pretty sure I’m not actually turning into Mabel. I knocked off 500 words because I had to. Then I knocked off the rough draft of a much longer review because I had to do that. I write fiction, I yammer and blog, I do my Alice thing. There are a lot of deadlines whizzing merrily over my head as we speak, but I am actually capable of doing the work I need to do when I’m convinced I really need to do it. (And for someone who has what can most charitably be described as a Catholic work ethic, I do in fact derive a lot of personal satisfaction from productive work.) But I decided to post this because identifying the problem is the first step in solving it, and I get the impression that a lot of people have the Mabel terror too. If you all have found strategies for dealing with this fear, let me know–since I’m quite aware that the Mabel terror makes me panic and avoid work I really need to do. Everything becomes overwhelming and impossible–yet another reason I need hard and fast deadlines, with consequences, so that I can prove to myself that I can deliver the goods.