Be bad at ANYTHING

I’m a big advocate of journaling.  The habit of indulging myself on the page has become a life-changing, enriching, emboldening, expansive endeavor.  I write about stupid things.  I joke that if my posterity ever read my journal they’ll be like, “Who is [fill in the blank] for whoever is causing drama in my psyche?”

“It’s not important!” I’ll reply. 

“Yeah, but that name is mentioned like 7000 times in here!” And because it's in a word document they can ctrl+F and actually get an accurate count. *Sigh.*

Then I’ll reply with some sage wisdom about how what is going on in life is always more about you and less about the other people that step in to fill certain roles.

Because it’s been such a helpful tool for me, I have trouble not advising everyone to journal all the time.   But this isn’t fair—because some of us aren’t writers!  What if someone told me, Michelle, I really need you to sculpt this life experience—like pour it all into a sculpture.  Make me know what you are feeling and doing and being in this moment with clay…or worse—marble.

I would respond with a lot of fear and drama in my head because I know nothing about sculpture.  I could do it.  I’m confident of that.  If I applied myself, I could produce some piece of sculpture that would represent a piece of me.  It might take me 30 years but I could do it.  But WRITING is so much EASIER--for me!

So there is something to are said for picking a medium of expression that feels somewhat natural.  Maybe you have some skill with drawing or photography or singing or welding metal fragments.  There are so many ways to express oneself--the point is to pick one!

What holds us back from picking one is the inner critic.  It’s the voice that develops at some point between the time we are first introduced to crayons and the seventh grade.  It’s the voice that says, You aren’t any good at this.  This is stupid.  No one wants to read this.  That drawing doesn't even look like a person.  That critic becomes somewhat helpful as we navigate school, friends, college and career selection.  That voice can push us into areas where we have natural ability.  But eventually it becomes a crippling companion.  It’s the Tanya Harding brute force that takes us out at the knees.  It’s ugly.

So the first step is in identifying the voice of that critic.  When it pipes up, just take note, hear what it says.  Then realize that you are not bound to it.  You are free to be BAD at anything you put your mind to!  

There it is.

You can do anything as long as you’re willing to be bad at it.

You are hereby liberated!

So the choice in medium becomes less important—do what fills you in this moment!  I’ll admit, writing was a natural choice for me.  I chose it because I felt I was already a little good at it.  That’s okay!  And some days I draw and I’m really VERY mediocre at drawing but, when I’m most successful is when I’m willing to be bad at it!  I like drawing and maybe some day I’ll take some classes and figure out how to be better at it, but why should that stop me from expressing myself that way now!?!

There’s an unspoken rule, once you reach real adulthood (I’m not talking age 18—I mean the time in life when you can really do you) that you should only do things you are good at.  That rule is silly.  And it sucks.  Literally it sucks all the fun out of life.

Recently, I’ve been reacquainting myself with the piano.  I took lessons from age 8-15.  I *should* be quite proficient with that amount of lessons under my belt, but I’m just okay.  That just-okayness held me back from playing for years and years!  And I LOVE playing the piano.  Finally I decided that was silly.  When I got a piano in my home, I considered taking lessons to get myself up to a proficient state, but then I chucked that idea right out.  NO!  I’m going to allow myself to be bad at it. Taking lessons so I feel worthy to grace an instrument I love with my music was so silly.  I’m worthy right now.

I’m taking opportunities to challenge myself in this way.  I selected some challenging songs that I love.  One of them is from A Star Is Born and performed by Lady Gaga.  I do my best to play and sing like Lady Gaga, which is hilarious!  But I tell you what!  I get a lot closer to sounding like Gaga by shamelessly TRYING than I ever did by playing small.  You won’t see me on America’s Got Talent EVER, but if you want a private, amateur performance in my living room—then I’m your gal!  And all that’s changed is my willingness to be bad at it.

The same thing applies to surfing.  Every time I paddle out, I face some of the same old insecurity demons.  Then I just decide I’m totally fine being the worst surfer in the water and sometimes I am, and sometimes that mentality allows me to immerse myself so fully into surfing I completely forget about the ranking system and just surf!

I love how Mark Nepo describes this.  He says that when we are gifted with something, it’s tradition to be told that we should become that thing.  If I’m decent at writing, people will say, “You should be a writer.”

“But the power is in the DOING, not the in the BEING,” Mark says.  The power is in the verb, not the noun.  So forget about being a writer, and write!  Forget about being a singer, and sing!  Forget about being a surfer, and surf!  Focus on the verb!  Do the thing!  Pick the medium!  Be the YOU doing the things that bring you to life!

This is my commitment to myself—to continue to allow me to be bad at things—because that’s where all the power and all the life is!  Here’s your permission slip to do the same!  Namaste.

Kids are the best examples of immersion. R just spent 90 minutes outside tonight relocating muddy water in cupfuls to different locations in the yard...mud might be his preferred medium...

The Marco Polo Prayer

Sometimes I can’t feel god.  I used to think this was because of something I had done.  That god had withdrawn from me.  I learned in church that god cannot dwell in unholy places so I assumed if I couldn’t feel god then something unholy was going on inside of me.  I felt shame about this.  I thought it meant something bad about me.  But I was wrong.

I am not sure exactly when I figured this out.  It was sometime after I had given up on doing everything correctly.  After I had shed another cage.  I observed that there were good people—people that I knew to be truly good at their essence—that didn’t keep all of the commandments, that didn’t worry about all the things.  I wondered if they felt god.  I believed they did.  I wondered if we could really distance ourselves from god.  And why would a god, who truly loved us, want distance from us?  

This didn’t make sense.  

I thought about the times when bad things happen to good people.  Like when I was diagnosed with cancer at age 21. Like when my friend’s babysitter was picked up for a DUI with her kids in the car the night she left for a trip across the country.  Like when my sister’s daughter had her first seizure the night she left on vacation.  Like when my grandmother’s oldest son was born with a heart defect.  Like when my friend’s daughter developed leukemia and was maimed by the treatment.  Like when my other friend gave birth and then broke her leg four days later at the same time as her dog was dying of cancer.  Where is god in all of this? Where are you, god!?! 

“I’m right here.  I’m right here.”

God is always here.  Right here.   

I learned this in the midst of my own suffering.  Mark Nepo related his experience with terrible sickness from chemotherapy to Oprah on her Supersoul podcast.  After a night of vomiting to the point of vomiting blood, Mark’s wife asked, “Where is god?” And Mark, in a moment of excoriated clarity, declared the knowing, “He’s right here.” 

This idea of suffering and god has formed a new kind of prayer for me.  I find myself, in moments where god feels particularly distant, asking, Are you there, god?  Then I answer for god, I’m right here.  It's like a game of Marco Polo, where I call out and god responds. And it always feels true.  God is right here, in the happy, in the suffering, in the mundane.  God is here inside of me.

God is in the peace AND in the suffering.  God is both.  God is all.  

So if god is in all of it, all of the human experience, then surely it is sacred.  Sometimes we get this confused in our minds.  We think god will preserve the righteous.  The scriptures are filled with this sentiment.  Yet bad things continue to happen to people we know and love and people we’ve never met that we only hear about in tragedy via the news.  That voice in my head that wants to distance me from god would say, If you would have done this differently then this might have gone differently, or If you were really listening to God you might have avoided tragedy.  Or prayed harder or been kinder or read more scriptures or donated more money or whatever things are on the to-do list of the "righteous."

Cheryl Strayed wrote this in a life-changing (for me) installment of her advice column, Dear Sugar.  It was in response to a letter writer who was struggling with her belief in god after her infant daughter developed a brain tumor that required invasive surgery.  Please visit this link for the full piece, as it is beautiful:

“Countless people have been devastated for reasons that cannot be explained or justified in spiritual terms. To do as you are doing in asking if there were a God why would he let my little girl have to have possibly life threatening surgery?—understandable as that question is—creates a false hierarchy of the blessed and the damned. To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion. It implies a pious quid pro quo that defies history, reality, ethics, and reason. It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having first been nailed to the cross.”

The Human Scale, Dear Sugar

The very half that makes rising necessary—is first having been nailed to the cross.  Maybe we are all to be nailed to the cross in this life.  We are meant to be set ablaze.  And even as this is happening we are meant to reach out to each other and up to god.  Maybe god is the love the burns between us in such moments of vulnerability and pain.  Maybe that is a close as we get to understanding god’s love for us.  Maybe that’s when we touch it.  

What if you allowed your God to exist in the simple words of compassion others offer to you? What if faith is the way it feels to lay your hand on your daughter’s sacred body? What if the greatest beauty of the day is the shaft of sunlight through your window? What if the worst thing happened and you rose anyway? What if you trusted in the human scale? What if you listened harder to the story of the man on the cross who found a way to endure his suffering than to the one about the impossible magic of the Messiah? Would you see the miracle in that?

The Human Scale, Dear Sugar

What if god was here, right here, always?

Cover art for this piece: I saw this on display at The Broad museum in LA. It's by Edward Ruscha, The Right People and Those Other People, 2011.