Practice
I took a photography class (online) tonight… one thing the teacher said was to practice photography every day because that’s how you get good at something – if you want to play a musical instrument, you practice, you don’t just pick it up once every six months and expect to improve.
Sometimes someone can say something in a certain moment that hits just the right way… even if I already know the thing they’re talking about… somehow in that moment it hits differently. That happened for me, tonight.
I get a lot of the “Write every day!” advice from the writing world… so, because I’m literal and ridiculous I set myself up with “Write every day!” and the corollary – if you miss a day you are suddenly an abject failure as a writer and all progress is lost.
But, practice is cumulative. Yes, daily practice will result in the greatest improvement. But if I’m learning to play the piano, and I have a really late night, and I’m really exhausted, I’m going to skip my practice for one night and I don’t believe I’m somehow failing at playing piano because I skipped a practice.
I do love photography and practice it regularly and I’m getting better, but there are days when I don’t do any photography at all, and… I don’t give up all my photographic aspirations (I also don’t stop enjoying photography).
Somehow I’ve gotten stupidly literal about writing every day. I need to work on that. I need to reframe it as “practice.” That has gotten lost, too.
I see my photography as practice. I can feel the little perfectionist demons trying to get into my photography – telling me how any given photo wouldn’t be good enough for a magazine… couldn’t support me financially, etc. But mostly, I enjoy photography enough that I can shut off those demons enough not to get completely discouraged from playing with my camera.
Yet, with writing… somehow… I can’t seem to grasp the practice piece. It is practice. Every day that I write is more practice. And when a day passes that is particularly busy, or difficult, or I’m on the phone with my therapist and my doctor and Sir is threatening to take me to an ER… it’s okay to skip writing for a day.
Last night was a horrible, rough night.
I didn’t write.
I am working on living with that.
Somehow I imagine when I master this concept, I’ll actually stop taking months-long hiatuses (I had to Google the plural for “hiatus”) because I become completely overwhelmed and frozen with perfectionism and performance anxiety.
That would be nice.
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