Is There Anything You Can't Do?

When I sit at these paint & sips I am often asked if I am a professional painter. I suppose I could say I am, in the sense that I went to school for it. I suppose I could say I am not if professional means someone who is paid for their work. The point is that I stand out. It may sound bragging, but I assure you that is not my intention. ​

In the past, even as a child, the grownups around me would marvel at how talented I was at whatever task they saw me do. My earliest memory of this is when I was six years old and my sister and I attended the Boys & Girls Club in Wallingford, Seattle for the summer. I was one of the youngest kids there, as far as I remember. We were reading "Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes" in which Sadako is told of the Japanese legend that says if she can fold one thousand origami paper cranes she will be granted a wish. She was dying from leukemia (caused by the fallout from the Hiroshima bomb) and her wish was to survive her illness and join the running team. She managed to fold 664 of them before she passed away. We as a club vowed to fold one thousand paper cranes in her memory. I remember how hard I thought they were to make at first and I felt like I would never learn. This feeling stuck with me. "These are hard and I am not very good at them" as I folded and folded trying to get "good at it." Until one day one of the teachers or older kids told someone: "If you want to learn how to do these, ask Jessica, she is really good at it." My perception shifted in that instance. Little Jessica, only six years old was teaching these older kids how to make paper cranes. 

I remember working hard on learning how to make those cranes. But the grown-ups seemed to think it had come easy to me. Especially considering how young I was. And in that instance, I realized that when I set my mind to it I could not only master something, I could master it quicker and more skillfully than others. Even though I knew I had worked hard on it, it seemed effortless to others. And I did quite possibly assert less effort than most to do this. Again, this is not to toot my own horn, I provide this story for context.

Even today, the people around me who only know me as a musician are completely taken aback when they see my paintings. They ask: "Is there anything you can't do?" The answer is yes. Unequivocally yes, there are many things I am terrible at. You just won't ever see me do them. 

Because here is the kicker: over the years I would try my hand at many things. The experience of the paper cranes as well as endeavors that came after, gave me a sense of how long I should work at something to get "good at it." If the skill level I expected didn't come within an acceptable period of time, I would simply stop and move on to something different. I might also get bored of the repetition, or the skill itself would hold no interest for me. I would simply avoid it.

It was also the level of skill I expected of myself. If I wasn't immediately or at least very quickly exceptional at whatever I was learning, I would move on. 

The problem is, you can't get through life as an adult like that. Avoiding things I'm not good at or interested in, does not work when you need to pay the bills or do other adult stuff. This has gotten me in trouble more than once. I have needed therapy and a twelve-step program to get a handle on this adult thing. At times I would have traded any number of skills for the ability to not feel like I was failing epically at life. 

As much as it is a nice feeling to stand out and be praised for your many talents, it is not conducive to my learning curve. Realizing this, I have stuck with things that I didn't have a knack for, and probably never will. It is necessary for someone like me, to train my stamina and ability to outlast uncomfortable situations. For instance, when I was training to become a yoga teacher in India, I was consistently last in my class. The last one to successfully get up into a headstand (an important pose in Sivananda Yoga) and to this day I have not been able to do the crow pose. But I did the training. And it was good for me. 

It may seem I am good at everything I try my hand at. So when people ask: "Is there anything you can't do?" I will reply with "yes. I'm not very good at adulting."