The Great Unlearning

Or: learning to be bad at things

For most of my life, I have avoided anything I wasn’t naturally good at. Not just avoided, but actively sidestepped - declined invitations, changed the subject, clever little escape routes so I wouldn’t have to stand in the unflattering light of beginnerhood. Part temperament, part training, part professional conditioning. A childhood spent observing exceptionalism as the path to a good life, followed by fifteen years in corporate America taught me (very efficiently) that competence was currency. That being excellent - polished, prepared, unflappable - was the price of admission to every room worth being in. Clumsy attempts and messy drafts weren’t entertained when the work rewarded people who appeared to be natural-born talents. So I learned to be someone who did, a muscle memory that spilled into the rest of my life. If I couldn’t do something well, I quickly decided it wasn’t worth doing at all. I suspect this had less to do with standards and more to do with a quiet suspicion that I had to be perfect in order to be worthy of love. Which, you know, is a very relaxed, super cool and chill way to move through the world that certainly won’t give you any anxiety at all. Ever. Yup.

My upbringing in classical music, while a sacred part of my soul, only reinforced it. Perfection is the name of the game and that training made me an elitist early on - convinced that only activities done at a professional level were legitimate. Talent mattered. Technique mattered. Being impressive mattered. Enjoyment, by comparison, felt flimsy and amateur felt like an insult. So between conservatories and conference rooms, I built a tidy little identity around being good at things - efficient, capable, hard to embarrass, infallible. Unlearning that has been much slower work.