Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists have recently observed a new disease rampaging through communities of young, ambitious, accomplished individuals. Symptoms seem to develop on the magnitude of years, brought on by exposure to highly competitive schooling environments and societal pressures towards finding “success.” Curiously, there’s been no need to enforce a quarantine, since the emergent symptom has resulted in affected persons boxing themselves into narrow definitions of life at their own volition. How can you detect if those you care for have been affected? They’ll tell you themselves.
I don’t like doing things I’m bad at.
They’ll probably say it with a chuckle and a hint at faux self-deprecation. But they’re not truly embarrassed to admit this - it’s actually a backhanded method of expressing pride. By owning and sharing this self-awareness, they convey through conversational negative space that
Oh, there are plenty of things I am good at. Enough that I know what it’s like to be good at something, and enough that I can save both you and me from suffering through the embarrassment of becoming aware of any lack in my self.
The shame of not knowing has somehow overshadowed the shame of not being willing to try, and this is perhaps the biggest shame of all.
We’re not born like this. Children are born curious, and society rewards their curiosity with opportunities to fail, and learn, and fail some more. But throughout an adolescence of tryouts and auditions and applications and competitions and exams, the stakes continue to rise, and the consequences of falling become more and more dire. When you create scarcity in “successful” outcomes, like college acceptances, first-chair seats, or job offers, you end up with competitive environments where the opportunity cost of putting time towards anything you don’t absolutely excel in is just too high. How many of us were explicitly told to abandon hobbies that we weren’t state-ranked in to optimize our college admission profiles?
Even after you cross the finish line of this first rat race, these instincts don’t leave you. This fear, this constant evaluation of ability, is a learned behavior that builds barriers between a person and the world around them. Before you can experience rejection, you reject the novelty yourself. You create a carefully crafted armor guarding the image you have of yourself as capable, intelligent, and talented.
If you spend enough time forced to quantify your strengths, you’ll build a habit of drawing lines between strengths and everything else. But these lines box you in. They make your life small and narrow, leaving you only in the bleak company of the skills you can reliably capitalize on.
Here’s the fact of the matter (stated harshly, with love):
Your fear of failure is narcissism masquerading as self-protection.
Refusing to look dumb is refusing to be a beginner, and this is arrogance. Your self-image cannot be so fragile as to prevent you from ever risking being the worst at something in a room. It’s scary - of course it is - but being, and being perceived as, a noob is essential to growth, and if you’re not growing, you’re robbing yourself of seeing how beautiful life can be.
Fighting past shame isn’t easy. Shame is a suffocating weight on your chest, a ball of iron in your stomach, a flame under your skin. It’s walking the mile in 7th grade, huffing and puffing while avoiding eye contact in the locker room, it’s holding up a group of senior citizens on a downhill hike on a narrow path, it’s stumbling in a ballet class surrounded by the paragons of poise. Fighting shame is, in many ways, a practice of forgiving yourself for not being the person you want to be, over and over and over again.
Listen to the insecurity - does it come from a fear of judgement? Is the reprimand you fear your own, or someone else’s? Perhaps it’s the gremlin voice in your head that chastises you for subjecting yourself to discomfort. That voice tries to convince you that you’re not the ‘type’ of person to do the things that you dream of, and that it’s embarrassing to have tried in the first place. Who taught you that? And is that how you see other people? Do you spend thought cycles policing others for their willingness to learn and grow? Are you wasting your own time putting up barbed wire and fences surrounding what you allow people to be and become? Judgement of others fuels the fire of the gremlin voice; releasing the bounds you put on others’ behavior also frees you.
Take stock of the people in your life. Are they kind people? Do they feed the gremlin, or drown him out? Do they create space for you to grow? Do they spend their time condemning others for the courage to become something they aren’t, yet? Would they rather be inconvenienced by your lack of skill or not have you around at all? If you tried to sit out of a game to do them a favor, do they breathe a sigh of relief or miss your presence? Don’t they want you to play with them in the future? How can you do that if they won’t play with you now? I understand that life isn’t a vacuum of self-pursuit - there will always be people that will carry a ruler in their pocket, and desperately seek to weigh you against metrics they recognize - but are those the people you want to define how you’re going to live your life?
It’s fundamentally a question of how much you’re willing to let the gremlin drive. Your brain is desperately looking for patterns and boxes to put people into, but most are meaningless. To be the person you want to become, you have to do the things that person does. The only difference between a person who stagnates and a person who becomes is their willingness to grow and bear through the growing pains.
In the past few years, I’ve had the gift of being surrounded by people who make my life bigger. People who take beginner ski lessons with me, people who taught me how to take a pull-shot in foosball, people who pace my runs, people who make music with me, and people who read my blog posts and encourage me to keep writing. These are the people who fuel joy in my life, and they’ve helped me realize that being a clumsy novice at something is much cooler than never doing anything at all.
Life can, unfortunately, acquaint you with several flavors of subtle status games. High school peers trying to evaluate your GPA and extracurriculars, aunties asking what you’ve been up to since college graduation, Twitter party attendees asking you for your “affiliation.” Sometimes these really are questions born of genuine curiosity, but often they’re just a channel for insecurity. People have an innate need to compare and contrast suitcases. Those who live their lives solely by the evaluation and validation of external measures of prosperity must survey the sample around them to know where to set the curve. Participating in status games is terribly unchic, but unfortunately unavoidable. When there isn’t an escape in sight, frankly, it is far easier to move through life when you’re proud of the work you do. I am not trying to say that you should disregard all social criteria - I actually don’t even think that’s healthy. Some amount of this ladder-climbing keeps you level, and vying for success guides your life towards stability and long-term prosperity.
In my current phase of life, I spend the vast majority of my waking hours at my job. When you’re taking part in the giant, formalized team project that is building a product, you don’t have a choice but to be measured by someone else’s yardstick. You have to hold yourself to some external measures of success, because otherwise you’re not taking your work, or its impact, seriously.
But save the effort of the climb for just one thing. Pick one thing to be absolutely phenomenal at, enough that your brilliance is intelligible against anyone’s metrics. And with all of the time left over, unabashedly chase unstructured joy.
My time outside of the office is for making things, seeing things, experiencing the world and its beauty while surrounded by people who inspire wonder. If I grow in these pursuits, it’s only to satisfy my own whims and desires, not participate in games where someone else writes the rules. Play jump rope with the lines people try to appraise you with, because it literally does not matter. You don’t have to be good at anything else; you just need to do things.
What an absolute gift it is to live a life so rife with opportunity that you get the chance to do things you’re bad at so regularly. At risk of unearthing a brand new flavor of narcissism, I am so in love with the shape my life has taken since learning that I could transform fear into ability.
The extra special bonus deal is that leaning into the practice of learning has changed the way I see myself and how I approach problems in all aspects of life. The more I release the fear of looking stupid, the better questions I ask, and the deeper understanding I develop of the world around me. I’ve also become more resilient when life presents challenges, because I’ve stacked up a record of a myriad of surmounted learning curves. The hardest part of learning is the vertical incline before the inflection point; when you make your team worse at volleyball, meekly apologizing after each missed point. Most people aren’t willing to push past that initial (terrible) discomfort. But trudging through the mud builds muscle not just in the skill at hand, but in cultivating belief in the power of your effort.
And this essay isn’t to say that I’ve mastered the practice of living this way - after all, I’m still just a beginner :). It’s instead an invitation to the people in my life, and to the people who may stumble upon this post, to join me in bumbling through sewing and surfing and Fantasy Football. Inoculate a little bit of the foreign and the unknown into the life you are so carefully protecting, and give your body a chance to build immunity against fear.
Back to Home