I, too, am in the unnecessary control grip club. Unnecessary control grip - talk about life imitating art 🤭but nobody ever tried to correct me, I had no idea there was a right way of holding a pencil? Going to cite it as the reason for my substandard drawing abilities.
I loved reading this. The photo of Jana is also so beautiful. I stopped and stared (In the least creepy way haha!) Just beautiful! Also can relate to the pencil grip. I can't do it any other way haha!
Shall we start a club of us here who use the unnecessary control grip? Thank you for naming and describing how you wrestle with failure and rethink it, all while making art. This is making me want to pick up my pen (but how?!) and work on my own list.
Jana, your writing has always been so beautiful, honest and inviting. This is one I will reread and reread. The loop of failure is something I struggle with. Thank you again for your words 💕
I really enjoyed this one. I'm in a weird place in life where it's easy to look back and see much of it as failures. But I LOVE how you simple said, much of them are just facts. Awesome way to reframe it.
The thing about the feeling of like a failure is knowing all the ways that we've uniquely failed, and that can be so lonely. No one else has failed in the ways that we have failed, so we must be entirely alone. Is it really merely self-pity to list your failures? I don't know. I feel like it gives people opportunity to see recognize themselves and not feel so alone.
We all feel like we've failed, but as you've pointed out, there is no failure if you can keep trying. We're not failing. We're experiencing a lack of success, which isn't exactly the same thing, but it feels bad because no one has said that it's ok to not have success.
This is such a great and nuanced question about this kind of thing--perceived failures have a lot to do with our internal and perceived definitions of failure and success, both.
I think you're right--it wasn't just self-pity I was facing as I stared down that list, but context and awareness. Typing out my list line-by-line and staring it down, facing it, it both looked worse than I expected, and not as bad. You're right, Amy, I think that even seeing it in print, and sharing it with Jen and her readers made me feel less isolated. There's something that writing and sharing does that is kind of magic in the way it acts on the why-spirals.
Also: I'll be noodling over how failure isn't quite the same as "lack of success" for a while. I've been in the process of detaching from Hustle culture, startup world, and a world in which productivity and time-tracking are everything. I've been used to speaking in absolute paradigms about success and failure in that culture--failed startups or successful ones. Failed projects or greenlit ones. Successful launches or products you never hear of again. And the thing is, I know many who were part of even some of the same projects I have on my list of Very Important Failures, who do NOT carry around the same sense of failure I have taken on...so there's a lot of it that is probably directly correlated to my story and the way I perceive the world. It's amazing what shining a light on shame can do.
I realize sympathize with you trying to recover from hustle culture.
I've been thinking about this, and I've been wondering if the phrase, "self-pity" was just invented to shame people for feeling bad about their circumstances. I think it's natural to have pain when we have misfortune.
I often experience what you're describing: when something goes wrong, I believe it must've happened because I wasn't good enough in some way. It's like shame is a monster that lives in my gut and feeds off of various "I've messed up" stories, and so he keeps asking me over and over, "How did you mess this up?"
Anyway, what you wrote was really nice. I'm glad you shared it.
Such a fabulous read! I found this part fascinating: "It’s possible that being a right-handed child of two left-handed parents, I couldn’t get as much early mirror-training with handwriting."
My husband is the right-handed offspring of left-handed parents, and he's the most left-biased right-hander I have ever met - he's not ambidextrous in his writing, but doesn't really seem to mind which hand he uses for most other tasks. However, he always wields a spoon left-handed - and he ties his tie as a left-hander, because his dad had taught him. 😍
I'm left-handed and find myself having to 'translate' right to left whenever I'm learning anything new. When I was teaching my craft I would make a point to demonstrate both right- and left-handed, because I remember when I'd first learned I'd had to work it out for myself. I'd been the only leftie in a class of right-handers with a right-handed instructor, and didn't want anyone to be in that position under my instruction!
Thanks, Rebecca! I am extremely right-handed and struggle to use my left hand for anything...yet I have the creative "right-brained" approach in many things that is correlated to left-handedness. My dad and mom are both lefties, but had very different experiences. My dad is dyslexic and dysgraphic, and his handwriting teacher in the 50s simply told him she couldn't teach him, so he'd have to figure things out the best way he could. His school even told kept him from taking higher-level science and math classes because he couldn't pass spelling, a requirement back then. Obviously today he'd have been given an IEP and accommodations that would have helped him.
So I don't know if any of those things contributed to my needing 40 years to understand what my first-grade teacher was trying to show me :-D, but it is certainly an exercise to consider all those contributing factors, and then intentionally look at this with a beginner's mind, as an opportunity and not as a failure...something I'm working hard to practice! Thanks for reading :D
That's a good combination, Jana, being both right-handed and right-brained! And gosh, so many people suffered with the limited thinking of their teachers not all that many decades ago. Your poor dad - what a silly teacher he'd had. Jim's dad hadn't been allowed to write left-handed, but as soon as he left school he went back to the right way round for him.
Couldn’t love this more!
I, too, am in the unnecessary control grip club. Unnecessary control grip - talk about life imitating art 🤭but nobody ever tried to correct me, I had no idea there was a right way of holding a pencil? Going to cite it as the reason for my substandard drawing abilities.
The work of drawing is always there...but I am a little annoyed I made it harder than it needed to be!
I loved reading this. The photo of Jana is also so beautiful. I stopped and stared (In the least creepy way haha!) Just beautiful! Also can relate to the pencil grip. I can't do it any other way haha!
Haha thank you! Headshot photo taken by my talented friend, Juliann www.jumaydesigns.com
Shall we start a club of us here who use the unnecessary control grip? Thank you for naming and describing how you wrestle with failure and rethink it, all while making art. This is making me want to pick up my pen (but how?!) and work on my own list.
Jana, your writing has always been so beautiful, honest and inviting. This is one I will reread and reread. The loop of failure is something I struggle with. Thank you again for your words 💕
Love you, mer! Many thanks to jen for sticking with me through the shitty (and long)first draft on this one and getting to the essentials.
I really enjoyed this one. I'm in a weird place in life where it's easy to look back and see much of it as failures. But I LOVE how you simple said, much of them are just facts. Awesome way to reframe it.
This was a great read.
The thing about the feeling of like a failure is knowing all the ways that we've uniquely failed, and that can be so lonely. No one else has failed in the ways that we have failed, so we must be entirely alone. Is it really merely self-pity to list your failures? I don't know. I feel like it gives people opportunity to see recognize themselves and not feel so alone.
We all feel like we've failed, but as you've pointed out, there is no failure if you can keep trying. We're not failing. We're experiencing a lack of success, which isn't exactly the same thing, but it feels bad because no one has said that it's ok to not have success.
This is such a great and nuanced question about this kind of thing--perceived failures have a lot to do with our internal and perceived definitions of failure and success, both.
I think you're right--it wasn't just self-pity I was facing as I stared down that list, but context and awareness. Typing out my list line-by-line and staring it down, facing it, it both looked worse than I expected, and not as bad. You're right, Amy, I think that even seeing it in print, and sharing it with Jen and her readers made me feel less isolated. There's something that writing and sharing does that is kind of magic in the way it acts on the why-spirals.
Also: I'll be noodling over how failure isn't quite the same as "lack of success" for a while. I've been in the process of detaching from Hustle culture, startup world, and a world in which productivity and time-tracking are everything. I've been used to speaking in absolute paradigms about success and failure in that culture--failed startups or successful ones. Failed projects or greenlit ones. Successful launches or products you never hear of again. And the thing is, I know many who were part of even some of the same projects I have on my list of Very Important Failures, who do NOT carry around the same sense of failure I have taken on...so there's a lot of it that is probably directly correlated to my story and the way I perceive the world. It's amazing what shining a light on shame can do.
I realize sympathize with you trying to recover from hustle culture.
I've been thinking about this, and I've been wondering if the phrase, "self-pity" was just invented to shame people for feeling bad about their circumstances. I think it's natural to have pain when we have misfortune.
I often experience what you're describing: when something goes wrong, I believe it must've happened because I wasn't good enough in some way. It's like shame is a monster that lives in my gut and feeds off of various "I've messed up" stories, and so he keeps asking me over and over, "How did you mess this up?"
Anyway, what you wrote was really nice. I'm glad you shared it.
Such a fabulous read! I found this part fascinating: "It’s possible that being a right-handed child of two left-handed parents, I couldn’t get as much early mirror-training with handwriting."
My husband is the right-handed offspring of left-handed parents, and he's the most left-biased right-hander I have ever met - he's not ambidextrous in his writing, but doesn't really seem to mind which hand he uses for most other tasks. However, he always wields a spoon left-handed - and he ties his tie as a left-hander, because his dad had taught him. 😍
I'm left-handed and find myself having to 'translate' right to left whenever I'm learning anything new. When I was teaching my craft I would make a point to demonstrate both right- and left-handed, because I remember when I'd first learned I'd had to work it out for myself. I'd been the only leftie in a class of right-handers with a right-handed instructor, and didn't want anyone to be in that position under my instruction!
Thanks, Rebecca! I am extremely right-handed and struggle to use my left hand for anything...yet I have the creative "right-brained" approach in many things that is correlated to left-handedness. My dad and mom are both lefties, but had very different experiences. My dad is dyslexic and dysgraphic, and his handwriting teacher in the 50s simply told him she couldn't teach him, so he'd have to figure things out the best way he could. His school even told kept him from taking higher-level science and math classes because he couldn't pass spelling, a requirement back then. Obviously today he'd have been given an IEP and accommodations that would have helped him.
So I don't know if any of those things contributed to my needing 40 years to understand what my first-grade teacher was trying to show me :-D, but it is certainly an exercise to consider all those contributing factors, and then intentionally look at this with a beginner's mind, as an opportunity and not as a failure...something I'm working hard to practice! Thanks for reading :D
That's a good combination, Jana, being both right-handed and right-brained! And gosh, so many people suffered with the limited thinking of their teachers not all that many decades ago. Your poor dad - what a silly teacher he'd had. Jim's dad hadn't been allowed to write left-handed, but as soon as he left school he went back to the right way round for him.
I published this post about my left-handedness a little while back - you might enjoy it: https://rebeccaholden.substack.com/p/93-old-gold-my-awkwardness-is-sinister 😊