1: Amateur Hour

amateur hour: noun, U.S. idiomatic

• A situation or activity in which the participants show a lack of skill, sound judgment, or professionalism.

(Source: Wikipedia)

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You know when you go to a friend’s game or show or recital or whatever and you are really excited to be there to support your friend because you know how hard they’ve worked and how many hours they’ve practiced and how well prepared they are for this one, shining moment when all eyes are on them? And you just know deep in your bones that your friend is absolutely going to kill it and blow everyone away with their considerable skills, creative talent, and charming personality?

Great. This is not going to be that.

Frankly, typing this out just feels clumsy, like someone’s forcing me to ice skate before I’ve learned how to walk. Except it’s somehow worse—and not to mention way more embarrassing—because 1) that someone who is doing the forcing is just me and 2) the ice skating thing is actually attempting to post something sincere on the Internet. That being said, I have a theory that the clumsy feeling might be a good thing.

By nature, I’m not a very vulnerable person, nor am I particularly active on social media. I also have no particular goal for creating this website, nor did I run this idea by anyone who loves me enough to stop me from doing it before I just went ahead and bought myself a domain. I’m truly not sure what I’m doing here. So, before anyone spends any more of their one precious life on earth browsing this website, let’s get something clear, neighbor:

Do not expect to be impressed here.

Welcome to amateur hour.

Despite my many, still-present doubts about pursuing this personal project, that is what this is all about to me—embracing amateur hour. Celebrating it, even! The fast-paced, results-driven, goal-oriented, grind culture of modern-day America has been feeling quite unforgiving to me lately. Picture-perfect angles, travel post after travel post, life milestones laid out in a seemingly infinite scroll from strangers and friends alike… I mean, some days when I’m online, all I can do is shake my fist up at the sky and ask myself if I’m the only person left in the world who still makes mistakes.

Don’t get me wrong, I love posting my set of carefully curated, hand picked, greatest hits online as much as everyone else. In many meaningful ways, I think that’s what most social media platforms are designed for. I also think that it’s not even an inherent evil. It’s fun to use social media to celebrate and advertise and immortalize our highest highs. Live and let live! But there is a real downside to always communicating like this, too.

The values that guide the way we present ourselves online are starting to bleed into our real lives. When we start internalizing the possibility of living these picture perfect lives, we inadvertently isolate ourselves from each other, and in doing so, we accidentally rob ourselves of some of the best parts about being human.

How so? Well, once we erase all the hard work, the trial-and-error, the blood, the sweat, the tears, the late nights and early mornings, the soreness, the sacrifices, and the heartbreaks that it took to get that perfect picture or that one award or that happy relationship, etc., we don’t get to truly celebrate the achievement of those milestones. We don’t get to sit still long enough to let it sink in that we challenged ourselves to do something difficult, nor do we get to appreciate that act of challenging in and of itself. We don’t get to laugh things off that don’t work out. We don’t get to openly grieve the things we lose that, hey, actually—we really, really didn’t want to lose. We don’t get to ask for help when we need it. We don’t get to help out a neighbor, even when we would have had the capacity and desire to do so. We don’t get to learn or to grow or to fully breathe in our moments.

“If you fall, get up and try again,” they say. Well, how exactly was anyone planning to get up again? When no one seems to want to admit they ever fell down in the first place?

Here’s the thing: I took guitar lessons my senior year of college. No real reason why. Sort of just wanted to. I remember buying my first guitar with a friend who drove me to the store. I remember thinking it was the first time I had ever picked up a guitar—and how annoyingly cumbersome it was for my 5’0 body to drag that thing to campus twice a week. I remember how embarrassed I was on the first day of class to realize that AMC 160: “Guitar for Beginners” was not really filled with, like, beginner-beginners. I remember those lessons vividly. I sincerely wonder if I might have accidentally invented some of the early, miserable sounds that came out of my guitar (as they were so awful I’m not sure I want to force God to take the credit.) I was easily the worst player in the room. I remember broken fingertips, butchered music scales, and a bruised ego texting my roommates to warn them when I was going to practice for quiz days. I remember trying really, really hard with Gina (the guitar). And despite all that effort, I remember ending the semester still being a horrible little menace of a guitar player.

But what I remember best is how fun it was to be openly bad at something—and to do it anyway.

Once I got over the internal drama of being such a failure about playing, I couldn’t help but think about all the times I wanted to do something but ultimately didn’t, just because I didn’t want to fail. Or, maybe more truthfully, just because I didn’t want anyone to see me fail. I think that’s got to be one of the worst things about trying to live a picture-perfect life: we don’t get to try new things out of fear of being bad at it. And that’s a weirdly miserable fate—to always do more of the same only because the same is what you know.

I guess I want to give myself a gift instead of a goal this year, and that gift is simply the freedom to fail. That is, to fail loudly, spectacularly, unapologetically, and happily, at whatever I want, with whomever I want, whenever I want, and for however long I want to do so. So I fail at something. Maybe I’ll get better if I keep doing it. Maybe I won’t! But I’ll have done it. And I think that’ll be pretty cool.

As an aspiring amateur, I’m using my freedom to fail to start this website. I’m casting a wide net for it for now—I make no formal commitments about what I will do with my little corner of the world wide web, beyond the promise to try to share my things and my thoughts as truthfully as I can when I can. I imagine that this website will change as I try stuff out and see what works for me and—just as importantly—what doesn’t. I will adjust accordingly, and I will learn to make peace with some inconsistencies, some missteps, and some steep learning curves along the way. I will have fun, mostly, and I will be grateful, always.

And hey, if you’re still reading this, I hope you give yourself the same freedom to fail too, whatever that looks like to you.

Have a great day.