Being really bad at something is pretty fun

Lessons in quelling perfectionist tendencies.

This is The Snack Desk, a newsletter in which I’ll share personal essays, gems from different corners of the internet, and other bites for your snack break.

Growing up, I hated being bad at things. I suppose most people become frustrated when attempting something they find difficult, but I grew up right alongside someone who never seemed to feel that way: my older brother.

My brother and I are only two years apart. We did similar activities as kids, probably because it meant fewer carpool dropoffs for my parents. We were both on the swim team. We both played soccer. When he joined a baseball team, I faithfully followed suit by signing up for softball.

Swimming and soccer came naturally to me; my coaches for both of these sports loudly commended my natural athletic ability. So it came as a shock when I tried softball and quickly discovered that I was really, really bad at it.

I just could not figure out how to guide an unwieldy bat to align perfectly with the incoming projectile of a 90-miles-an-hour softball.

Okay, so maybe the 7-year-old softball girls weren’t pitching at 90 MPH. But for all the strikeouts I had, they might as well as have been.

I did love stomping around the dugout with my teammates, clamoring onto the chain link railing and yelling out cheers as loud as our little lungs could muster. But sooner or later, I’d be called up to the batters’ box and then to the plate, where I’d have a face off with the pitcher. The call always came in the end: STEEEERIIIIIKE THREE!

Playing in the outfield wasn’t much better. It meant standing around for interminable stretches of nothing much happening that were punctuated by unpredictable flurries of activity in which all eyes in the entire game were on me, a ball soaring in my direction and never making contact with my glove.

I tried to improve, and other people tried to help me too. My best friend’s mom was a softball coach, and she kindly, patiently, generously took me out into the yard a couple times to give me helpful pointers. Mind you, she’s coached multiple teams to state championships, but even her expert guidance was for nought. I was bad at softball. That’s all there was to it.

I did not handle this well. I would convince myself I was feeling nauseous before games in the hopes that I wouldn’t have to play. I’d send up prayers that every inning would end before I’d have to go to bat. I’d lay down in the grass and cry.

I knew there was a better way to approach all this. I knew it because I saw my brother do it.

My eternally optimistic and determined big brother would go to every one of his baseball games and be cursed with a similar affliction: he just couldn’t hit the ball. But he never laid down in the grass to cry, at least not that I never saw. He just kept showing up, bat in hand, smile on his face. He made friends with his teammates. He had fun.

The same was true for other sports he played where he wasn’t the star player, but he continued to sign up for sports season after season. He joined the wrestling team and was promptly pinned in every match. He tried out for basketball and rode out the season on the bench. Because this was the 90s, he got his participation trophy for each one, but I knew he didn’t do any of this for the trophies. He enjoyed the act of playing.

He was a lifelong model of how to have fun with things he couldn’t do particularly well. Even so, I never took his lessons to heart until a global event within the past few years gave me a little more time at home than I was used to.

During the pandemic, in my search for something to do within the confines of my room, I dug out an old set of pastels. I typically find pastels difficult to blend and control, but I figured I could give them another go.

I put pigment to paper, and my first attempt was… not great. It looked like a flower, so that was a start, but if you saw it without knowing who made it, you’d think it was done by a ham-fisted kid with a box of Crayola crayons rather than something a fully grown adult spent 45 minutes painstakingly layering colors to create.

Attempt #2 is where things got really laughable. By that I mean I laughed, out loud, many times, while trying to finish this drawing. This time, I tried actively following a step-by-step video tutorial. I unfortunately didn’t understand that you cannot follow a tutorial meant for hard pastels if you’re using oil pastels. You simply cannot! (And yes, this is an attempt to blame what happened next on my improper tools rather than lack of skill.)

I used my oil pastels to happily scratch away at my little rectangle of paper, watching Karen in the video confidently swipe across her canvas with her hard pastels. Look at what Karen made:

Just gorgeous. And now look at what I made:

I… mean… look at the “poppies”—the little orange donuts on tiny green sticks. Look at the “trees”—the scribbled lines going in every direction. There is so much to look at here. Go ahead, take it all in.

So I’m bad at pastels! That much was abundantly clear, but I found myself reacting to this disappointment in a new way. Instead of feeling like I want to lay down on the carpet and cry, I felt pretty good. I do love laughing at myself, and it’s nice to have made a real, tangible thing that I can look at and laugh.

It’s also just deeply satisfying to work on something that is completely for fun. There’s no pressure to be good at this. If I hadn’t posted these drawings on the internet, no one would ever know or care about my donuts-on-sticks. I don’t have to impress anyone with this skill. And, most importantly, I don’t have to get better at it. I can remain bad at pastels my whole life, and it will still make me happy to slide the cardboard cover off of my box of 12 bright colors and take them out one at a time.

For the record, my brother did eventually find the athletic activity that he became exceptionally good at: rock climbing. I think he’d appreciate me telling you that.