Vlog Post: The Courage to Start

My first video blog post in which the skull bow and I discuss being a beginner.
For anyone who can't (or doesn't want to) watch the video, I've included the transcript below.

Good morning, Miss Muse, it is Monday, April 22, 2013.

And considering this is my first, ever, vlog post, I thought it might be a good idea to talk about being a beginner. We all start out life as beginners. We have to learn to walk, to crawl, to speak, how to hold a spoon, how to eat without getting it all over our face. And yet it seems like, as we progress through the ages, the time that we’re allowed to need to learn something gets smaller and smaller and smaller.

It’s starting to seem like, anytime you walk onto a new job, your boss automatically expects you to know things that you could never possibly have any inkling as to how it works. And when you make a mistake, it’s a ginormously, huge thing, and it could simply be because “Holy crap, I didn’t know how that worked. Go figure.”

And this can also, you know, hinder us from attempting to do the things that would really bring some sparkle to our lives.

I know, it’s a little cliché, sparkly lives.

But, for instance, art.

Art is one of those things that, as beautifully simple as it sounds…there’s a learning curve. There’s a learning curve for pretty much any kind of art you go into, any hobby you go into, really, there’s a learning curve. I mean, you can’t decide to go fishing if you’ve never baited a hook before, or if you don’t know how to cast, for instance. (I suck at that, by the way.)

Really, in a world that demands absolute perfection from us, it takes courage to be a beginner. To not know what you’re doing, and yet go out and try it anyway.

Are you going to make mistakes? Mmm…most definitely. But that’s part of the learning process.

Part of the courage to be a beginner is to allow yourself the ability to make mistakes, to allow yourself that time where you’re not going to be perfect. And really, because we expect ourselves to be these nice, shining bubbles of perfection it’s really hard to let go of the idea that “Oh my gosh, I can’t to EVERYTHING right. I…uhh, what am I going to do…I…gah!”

It’s like really, really frustrating and scary to take on a new venue.

And I suppose that’s really the whole point. It does take courage. You’re not pathetic if it takes you that extra kick in the pants from yourself or someone else to actually go out and do something new.

Cuz, heck, it took me…four whole years to decide “You know what? This is what I want to do. I want to swashbuckler on paper for a living.”

There was a large learning curve. But that’s okay, because in order to be great at anything, you have to be a beginner. Them’s the breaks.



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