To suck at things

The actual footage of the paragraph below.

One sunny afternoon, just before the pandemic hit, I sat alone in my favorite coffee shop, sipping an iced long black while picking up my first watercolor brush. I used to think that the last thing I’m good at was drawing. I can write and eat up big books, and I’m an okay bedroom singer. But drawing? Nuh-uh.

Fast forward a few days ago, I “confidently” uploaded a digital drawing to my designated Instagram “art-page” (instead of writing a report for work—and yes, both quotation marks meant to be ironic). Last week, I spent my Saturday morning sat on my desk painting handmade bookmarks and postcards to send out to my friends.

A package I sent to Adinda, taken by her.

I’m not saying that I’m good at it. But that’s not the point.

The point is the exact opposite. The point is being not good at it; well, for now.

Before I started this new hobby, I lost appetite in any other activity that I used to enjoy doing; I couldn’t seem to write anything, it had been a while since I finished a book, and I had an extremely low level of confidence to do cover performances. But I was feeling extremely anxious over a particular uncertainty and I needed to vent it on something.

I wasn’t writing because I was afraid I would write a bad piece.

I wasn’t reading because I was stressing over my 2020 reading target.

What used to be stress-relievers now have become stressors.

So I decided that I want to do other things—things that weren’t in my usual to-do lists.

I decided to become a newbie.

From the Cambridge online dictionary.

Don’t get me wrong, doing new things dreaded the hell out me. What if I suck? Should I even try? It’s definitely stressful to always want to get it right—and I’m that kind of person.

But that one day; the one sunny afternoon I told you about in the beginning, I didn’t think about acing this thing. I only thought about the colors I want to brush on the paper, the shapes I wanted to draw; and how they would help me ease my stress.

Doing this in public only shows that I didn’t care what people thought of me (or my sucky drawings!)—and it’s a great stress-reliever!

I started to draw just for the sake of it; I didn’t care if I got the techniques wrong. I only cared that doing it took my mind off of uneasiness and anxieties and whatever it was clouding my head at the moment.

And then I thought—

—wow, it’s good not to have to think about people’s expectations of me.

They know I’m gonna suck, because they know I’m a newbie. If anything, I’m fulfilling their expectations. And even if they don’t know, I don’t care because I know that I only started.

It’s good to suck at something, and it feels great to grow fond of yourself as you’re braving yourself to suck at something for a change.