The Guitar That Sits in the Corner
My acoustic guitar has been leaning against the same wall for three months now, gathering dust like a very expensive coat rack. I bought it after watching too many campfire scenes in movies, convinced I’d become one of those people who casually strums while friends gather around. Instead, I’ve mastered exactly one and a half chords, and my rendition of “Wonderwall” sounds like a cat having an existential crisis.
The thing is, I’m not actually trying to get better. Every few weeks I pick it up, fumble through the same chord progression, remember why my fingertips hurt, and set it back down. I’ve created this perfect loop of musical mediocrity, and I’m starting to think it’s intentional.
Learning Japanese Through Sheer Stubbornness
My Duolingo streak hit 247 days last Tuesday, which sounds impressive until you realize I still can’t order coffee in Tokyo without pointing at pictures. I know how to say “the cat eats apples” with perfect pronunciation, but ask me to have an actual conversation and I’ll panic-bow my way out of the room.
The app congratulates me daily for learning five new words, but what it doesn’t track is how I immediately forget four of them. I’ve been stuck on the same lesson about family relationships for two weeks because I keep confusing “older brother” with “younger sister.” My brain treats Japanese vocabulary like a leaky bucket, and I keep pouring water into it anyway.
Maybe this is what “lifelong learning” actually looks like. Not the smooth upward trajectory of competence we imagine, but this stuttering dance between knowing and forgetting, confidence and confusion.
The Bread That Won’t Rise
Sourdough starter maintenance has become my weekly humiliation ritual. Every Sunday I feed Herbert (yes, I named him) with fresh flour and water, whisper encouraging words, and place him in what I think is the perfect spot. By Thursday he’s either died completely or achieved some concerning shade of gray that definitely wasn’t in the tutorial videos.
I’ve killed seven starters in four months. Each time I convince myself I understand what went wrong. Too cold, too warm, wrong ratio, bad timing. I approach each new attempt with the confidence of someone who has definitely figured it out this time, only to find myself googling “is mold supposed to be fuzzy” the following week.
The irony isn’t lost on me that I’m trying to master something called “patience bread” while being spectacularly impatient with the entire process. Herbert number eight is currently bubbling hopefully on my counter, and I’m already planning his funeral.
Running Like a Broken Robot
My running form, according to the helpful stranger who jogged up beside me last month, resembles “a penguin having a seizure.” This was both oddly specific and uncomfortably accurate. I’ve been running the same three-mile loop for six months, and somehow I’m getting worse at it.
Every running article insists I should focus on my breathing pattern, foot strike, and cadence simultaneously. Instead, I spend most of my time wondering why my left knee makes that clicking sound and whether the person behind me can hear it too. My running app cheerfully announces my splits as if they’re achievements, but mostly they’re documentation of my steady decline into cardiovascular chaos.
Last week I got lapped by a woman pushing a double stroller while talking on the phone. She made it look effortless. I was making the same face people make when they’re trying to solve complex math in their head, which is apparently what running feels like for me now.
The Permission to Be Bad
There’s something liberating about admitting you’re terrible at things you’re actively trying to learn. Not in a self-deprecating way, but in an honest assessment kind of way. I’m bad at guitar, Japanese, bread-making, and running, and I’m going to keep being bad at them for the foreseeable future.
Maybe the goal isn’t to get good quickly. Maybe it’s to get comfortable with the awkward space between wanting to know something and actually knowing it. That middle ground where you’re brave enough to try but honest enough to admit when you sound like a dying cat or look like a seizure-prone penguin.
I used to think learning meant moving from incompetence to competence in a reasonable timeframe. Now I think it might mean making friends with incompetence, letting it hang around longer than feels comfortable. Some of us are slow learners, and some of us are learning things that don’t want to be learned quickly.
Herbert number eight is still bubbling. My guitar hasn’t moved. My Japanese vocabulary remains tragically limited to fruit-eating cats. And tomorrow I’ll probably go for another robot-penguin run around the block. The process continues, beautifully and stubbornly imperfect.
