#mightyugly2015 first meeting: rock bottom, fear of failure

Last night, the Make 2015 Mighty Ugly book club had our first meeting. Six of eight members were able to attend.

I supplied snacks: veggies, fruit, cheese, crackers, and cupcakes. We had three of us with paper books and three on e-readers.

The assignment from Kim's book group plan was:
Get to know each other a little. Discuss the J.K. Rowling quote on page xii, and your reaction to the idea of using rock bottom as a solid foundation to build up from.

I'll be using first names to refer to myself and Sonja, because Sonja's a fairly public figure, but everyone else just gets initials unless/until they decide to reveal themselves here.

Introductions

I confessed to the group that half of me had really wanted to work up some adorable icebreakers; I know everyone in the group fairly well, but some of them met each other for the first time last night. The other half of me, however, was very tired and wanted to spend the night before this book group meeting playing Dragon Age: Inquisition, and that half of me won.

So, after some initial chatter, I asked if everybody felt introduced enough to move on. Sonja said that she wanted to know what everybody's creative thing was that they would be targeting through this process, to which my sister M.E. and I promptly both responded, "Everything." 

We went clockwise around the table, starting with the very brave J.C.H., identifying our current creative pursuits and ones that we want to pursue but maybe haven't yet. We had an eclectic mix, including painting, knitting, embroidery, crochet, writing, drawing, podcasting, webseries creation, and more. I think this was a great way for everyone to introduce themselves, and I'm super grateful to Sonja for thinking of it. Much better than some game where you answer questions based on what color M&M you pull out of a cup.

Rock Bottom

The J.K. Rowling quote to which Kim refers is

I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

This is a quote from her Harvard Commencement speech. You can view the whole thing here:

We discussed this idea of rock bottom, and we all agreed that living through the realization of a fear is a great way to learn that you can move forward. But we also all agreed that we'd really not like to hit rock bottom if we don't have to, and that maybe you can have a solid foundation to build from even if you've got some stuff on top of your rock bottom. I opened up about what rock bottom would mean for me: being laid low by my Hashimoto's thyroiditis to the point of not having the energy/ability to get out of bed. This is a very real fear of mine; I watched my mom, an accomplished maker in her own right, deal with this for years. The number of unfinished projects that I attribute to her illness is pretty high. And hitting that kind of rock bottom, as I imagine it, wouldn't really give me a solid foundation to build from, because if I can't really get out of bed, I can't do much else, either.

That said, my Hashimoto's is fairly well-managed and I'm not very likely to hit rock bottom. But its specter (I want to say spectre; apparently, I'm British) looms large in all of my making endeavors. There's a reason I prefer quick projects or projects that can lie fallow for a long time without disrupting my or anyone else's life.

So, we all agreed that actually being forced to move through the fear is a good way to realize you can keep going. But also that we'd like to be able to move through fears without actually hitting rock bottom.

This conversation naturally led to a discussion of success, failure, and fear.

Fear, Success, and Failure

Sonja posited that fear of success doesn't make sense, and we pretty much all agreed. But fear of failure was a thing that a lot of us have.

We talked about how failing a lot, failing on purpose, and failing at low-risk activities can reduce fear of failure. I also mentioned how failing privately can help, too.

From 2009-2011, I was fairly obsessed with making my own cupcakes, and like anything you do a lot, especially anything that requires following directions if you're a person who is good at following directions, I got pretty good at it. At a party once, someone asked me what the secret to my magical cupcakes was.

My answer: "The secret to making amazing cupcakes is that when you make a batch of bad cupcakes, you throw it away and don't let anyone eat it." Private failure. You learn from it, you don't tell anybody it happened, and you move on. I acknowledged that with making, there's a certain privilege involved in being able to just scrap the project. Not everybody can afford to just toss foodstuffs or craft supplies. But if you can, failure becomes much less toothy.

Sonja fails regularly, deliberately, and publicly, which I feel like must make failure seem just like a normal part of life for her, but she'll have to weigh in on that more herself. C.R. mentioned that when she's making, it's really more about the process for her than the product, and that she's her only audience, so she doesn't really care if she fails. I discussed the value of not knowing you're failing, which is how I eventually got better at crochet after many hats made in the wrong weight yarn and trapezoidal afghans. I also suggested that with failure, there is a fun threshold that if the process itself is rewarding enough, you don't even care that much whether you fail or succeed.

Low-risk public failure. This is supposed to be a spooky ghost. Instead, it just looks like a wig head with cheesecloth glued onto it, which is exactly what it is. Halloween 2013, my house. Literally nothing bad happened to me because of this failure, except that I was out the money spent on the supplies.

We didn't really get into this, but I think I have a fear of not finishing as much as I have a fear of failure. I notoriously drop projects. I also notoriously have a million plans/good ideas at a time, of which maybe 1% ever come to fruition. I think one thing that might take the power of this fear away is to ask myself what the real consequences will be if I drop any given project. The answer: probably minimal. 

We pretty much wound up once C.R. got a text that her baby was crying and required her presence. All-in-all, I think it was a good night and a great first meeting, and I'm really looking forward to the next one.