Last Friday, I eagerly told my green table writing mates about a new idea I had for an article.

They agreed it was a good idea. “Go for it!” they said. “Do it!” They are my best cheerleaders.

So I went online and did a quick search to see if anyone else had written on the topic and found a piece three years back, not too recent, and yet my face apparently fell, at which point one of my friends said, as if trying to staunch the flow of blood from a wound, “Oh no! Don’t get the Lydie discouraged face!”

At first it stung: Is the Lydie Discouraged Face a thing?

I must admit it is. High excitement is almost always followed by discouragement as I am flooded by real or imagined roadblocks.

So how do I move through the discouragement that threatens to stop me before I’ve even begun? It helps to remember I am highly susceptible to images and words. Like the time a woman in my writing group used the word “sophomoric” to describe a sentence I wrote, and it rang in my mind for days, impeding my efforts to write.

These new words, along with an image I can even see in the mirror, luckily, have the power to get me over myself. They help me recognize a pattern. Discouragement has already lost some of its influence on me as a result. If I can name it and see it, I can laugh it off and cast the Lydie Discouraged Face—now a powerless mask—aside.