by I spent last weekend being terrible at something. Deliberately, conspicuously terrible. I won’t say what because the details don’t matter, but I will say it involved muscle memory I do not have and a level of coordination my body refuses to cooperate with.
It was uncomfortable. That familiar adult feeling of standing at the bottom of a learning curve, looking up at a cliff face, and realizing the rope is entirely imaginary. When was the last time you were genuinely bad at something? Not “I could be better at Excel” bad. I mean full-on, can’t-do-the-thing, everyone-who-sees-you-knows-you-can’t-do-the-thing bad.
Children are bad at things constantly. It’s their default state. They fall, they fail, they mispronounce, they get it wrong, and then they do it again without a second thought about the dignity they just lost. Somewhere along the way, most of us swapped that for a quiet arrangement with competence. We gravitate toward the things we’re already okay at. We optimize. We get efficient. We stop being beginners because being a beginner feels like being watched.
But there’s something real at the bottom of that discomfort. A kind of mental reset that only happens when your usual shortcuts don’t work. Your brain can’t pattern-match its way through a problem it has no patterns for. It has to actually pay attention, which turns out to be exhausting and also strangely wonderful.
I noticed that my phone stayed in my pocket more. There was no room for the usual background noise because the foreground was consuming everything. No half-listening to a podcast while scrolling. No parallel processing. Just the thing, being done badly, requiring every bit of focus I had.
It’s been a while since I felt that kind of presence. The kind where the only thing that exists is the thing in front of you, and the only metric is whether you’re doing it slightly less poorly than you were ten minutes ago.
I don’t think the lesson is that we should all take up pottery or learn the banjo. I think it’s simpler than that. Competence is comfortable, but it’s also a closed loop. You get good at the things you already know, and then you live inside that circle. Breaking out requires being bad again, which is humbling and vulnerable and almost impossibly easy to talk yourself out of. But the inside of that circle is smaller than it feels.
I’ll go back to the things I’m okay at. I’ll enjoy them the way you enjoy a familiar chair. But I think I need to be bad at something every so often. Just to remember what learning feels like when there’s nothing to lean on.
— Teganna