Student Blog: It's Good to Be Bad

When did we stop doing things we enjoyed, because we thought we weren’t good at them? Somehow as we grew up we took an inability to complete a task as an irrefutable sign that we shouldn’t do it, and possibly that we shouldn’t even try. You realize there’s no way you’ll ever be able to dance like a Rockette, so you give up on it, and slowly you forget how happy it made you. You’ll never take the stage at Radio City, so why does it matter? If we can’t be the best…..We shouldn’t do it at all. 

This is me taking your hands in mine, smiling at you all nice and sweet. TELLING YOU IT’S OKAY TO NOT BE THE BEST AT SOMETHING. YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE TO BE GOOD. IF YOU LOVE IT, AND IT SPARKS JOY IN YOUR SOUL, THAT IS ENOUGH. Sorry for the yelling, but the truth must be told. 

I want you to bring back all your lost hobbies. The parts of performance you stay a million feet away from because you think you can’t conquer it. Unearth the cache of hidden talents you never got to explore because some part of you said it wasn’t worth it. 

Recently I’ve been digging up the lost treasure that is my love for technical theater. I used to love building and deconstructing sets. It brought me joy in a way that’s different from acting or even writing. But I started falling slowly out of love with it because it was difficult for me. Now I’m in a Stagecraft class three times a week, which is not only fulfilling a requirement for my Theater major, but is slowly reminding me of why I loved it in the first place. 

My inexplicable adoration for stagecraft is very ironic, because: I Am Bad At It! I can’t really draw a straight line, I am very unaware of how the laws of physics work, and just last week I tried to leg a platform while my drill was in reverse for a grand total of ten minutes before realizing my mistake!

Despite all this, I have found that there is so much wonder, love and magic in enjoying something I don’t really understand. It’s like looking at the night sky. Just because you don’t have any idea how it got there, or what it takes to send a person to space, that doesn’t make it any less beautiful. At the end of the day I’m not even a little bit confident with any tool other than a drill, and possibly a hammer (to be determined). And yet, three times a week, without fail, I walk into the theater ready to work in the scene shop, and inevitably make some mistakes. 

I can preach a lot about “learning is a process” and “don’t apologize for learning,” but honestly I don’t like making mistakes or being wrong anymore than the next guy. It took me a while (and if we’re being honest I’m still trying to convince myself)  that you can’t be angry at yourself for not knowing things that you have not had the chance to learn. Learning is a process that is different for everyone, we are all entirely different people who learn at different speeds. Learning can be so uncomfortable because it means getting really up close and personal with the idea that we don’t know everything. Your brain loves a pattern. Patterns are complete, perfect, succinct. The unknown, is anything but those things. The unknown is scary, the unknown is, well…..unknown. It’s a pattern we can’t get comfortable with because it’s not really a pattern at all. 

Somehow our brains equated not knowing everything about a topic: to being incomplete. And that became equal to being not being the best, which to put it simply is bad. Perfection became the end all be all. The answer to our to be or not to be, became not, because we could not be perfect. 

I may not be the next Tony award winning set designer, but I love my stagecraft class. I love pushing myself to learn and grow, it makes the days where I do solve the puzzle that much more rewarding. And when I inevitably mess up (which happens quite often) I know my professors have my back, and they are there for me for as long as it takes for me to figure it out. 

Here’s my rebuttal to all the brains of all the people of the world. You don’t have to know everything all the time. You are going to walk headfirst into the unknown a greater percentage of the time than you would hope for. You’re going to make mistakes, say the wrong thing, and not understand a situation no matter how much you try. And that is okay. You can love painting and not be Vincent Van Gogh. That is perfectly okay and you’ll save yourself an ear in the process. You can dance without being Fred Astaire, and there’s enough dance studios in the world that if you wanted to become the next Fred Astaire you could hone your craft to your heart's content. Don’t let perfection become the gatekeeper of your joy. 

Make your heart happy by doing the things that bring light into your life no matter how good you are at them. Art is subjective and abstract and so expansive that creating anything from nothing is already such a miracle in the grand scheme of the universe anyhow. Make your dent in the universe, and put your brain in its place. You deserve to do what makes your soul sing and what makes your world feel whole.