You used to be good at something

Not a hobby you enjoyed, which is a different loss we have already sat with. A skill. Something you could do well, that took years to build, that other people came to you for.

You could sew properly, or cook something difficult without a recipe. You spoke another language well enough to argue in it.

You could sight-read music, or fix an engine, or write something that landed. You knew plants, or numbers, or how to draw a face so it looked like the person.

And then it went unused for long enough that you stopped counting it. Now if someone asked, you would say you used to be able to, in the past tense, with that small apologetic laugh.

We talk a lot about lost pleasures. This is a different loss and it stings in a different place.

This is competence, which is its own particular kind of joy. The specific satisfaction of doing a hard thing well, of hands that know what they are doing before you have consciously decided anything.

That is not vanity. Being skilled at something is one of the ways a person knows who she is.

And when it goes unused for a decade, something in your sense of yourself quietly downgrades. You start to think of yourself as someone who manages things rather than someone who can do things.

What if I told you that your thinning hair might NOT be caused by what you think?

Forget everything you've heard about genetics or aging…

Specialists have uncovered 3 hidden culprits that could be crushing your hair follicles.

Video has been released! It exposes these hair-destroying villains.

If you've been feeling frustrated by your thinning hair, this video could be the game-changer you've been waiting for.

Because this is a breakthrough that could help people regrow their hair like crazy, even if nothing else has worked before!

Here is what I want you to know about rusty skills. They come back far faster than they were built.

The first attempt will be clumsy and you will hate it. The third will surprise you.

The knowledge is not gone. It is only unpracticed, and unpracticed is a completely different condition from lost.

So do the small version this week. Sew one seam. Read one page in the other language.

Play one piece badly. Draw one face. Make the difficult sauce.

Not to get it back. Just to feel your own competence stir, and to remember that you are a woman who is good at something specific and hard.

Things worth remembering about being skilled at something:

Tomorrow, permission to be a beginner at something instead, which is the opposite problem and just as heavy.

See you tomorrow.