THURSDAY · THE PERMISSION SLIP
Today we are going to talk about the thing you want to try and have not started, because you would be bad at it.
You know the one. You have looked it up more than once.
The class, the instrument, the language, the pottery, the swimming lessons you never had as a child. It sits there being appealing, and you never sign up.
The reason you give yourself is time or money, and sometimes that is honestly true. But underneath it, most of the time, there is something else.
You would be the worst one in the room. And you have not been the worst one in any room for twenty years.
Think about how long it has been since you were genuinely a beginner at anything. You have spent decades being the competent one, the one who knows how, the one others come to.
Being bad at something in public is not just uncomfortable now. It feels like a loss of standing, like something you have earned being taken away.
And there is an age argument that arrives right behind it. What is the point of starting now, when you will never be good, when the people in the class will be twenty-five.
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Let me take that one apart, gently. You are not starting so that you can become excellent, and the ten years it would take are going to pass either way.
The point of beginning is not the eventual skill. The five-minute version said the same thing about starting: badly and briefly beats not at all. It is the feeling of being alive in a way that only happens when you are learning something and failing at it.
Nothing wakes a person up like being genuinely bad at something she cares about. It is uncomfortable and it is completely absorbing, and absorption is the thing you have been missing.
So here is your permission, stated plainly. You are allowed to start something at this age and be terrible at it, in front of people, indefinitely.
You are allowed to never get good. You are allowed to quit after four lessons, or to keep going badly for years because you enjoy it.
Nobody is scoring this. You are the only one who ever was.
WHAT SHE SAID
Julia Child came to cooking late and was, by her own account, thoroughly unskilled at first. She is worth remembering not because she became famous but because she began as an adult, badly, and did it anyway.
THE QUESTION TO SIT WITH
What would I try this year if I accepted, in advance, that I would never be good at it?
See you tomorrow.
