On Thinking, Trying, and Asking For Help

I have a confession that probably won’t come as a surprise anyone:

I haaaaate being bad at things.

Like… obviously. No one wants to be bad at things. Maybe it’s my eldest daughter achievement syndrome, maybe it’s my 5,000 Capricorn placements, but I simply cannot fathom a world in which I am not automatically good at things. And I don’t mean that to say “wow I’m good at everything.” I mean: I love being good at things, but I would do anything to avoid having to become good at things. An excellent example of this is that my fiancée and I recently got a fancy laser cutter for our craft business. In my mind, we were going to get it and I would suddenly be cutting out all the things I would need to make our earring designs come to life. I could not have been more wrong, because I guess there’s something called a learning curve.

(Me reckoning with the learning curve that is headaches—the ice cap/noice cancelling headphones combo is god-tier for me right now)

The learning curve is something I have avoided a lot throughout my life. I am lucky to be able to pick up the basics of things pretty easily and then once I get a good enough handle on it, my confidence and my cis, white, able-bodied privilege has always taken over. (I also feel like I’m perceived as being better at things than I actually am, which feels very mediocre white man of me.) And if that combination is not enough to help me succeed, I quit.

Writing is the first thing that I’ve been willing to fully commit to the learning curve on. Which is good, because the learning curve never freaking ends. I’m writing two separate projects right now and BOTH of them are in new genres for me. I have a paranormal romcom and a cozy fantasy and I feel like a baby deer in both of them. I’m reading a lot of werewolf books and a lot of romcoms and about a book and a half ago I realized I was trying to skip the learning curve. I was reading and without even realizing I was doing it, I was simply trying to be “good enough” by osmosis and then carry on with my own project without any examining or thinking deeply about how to actually do it.

Speaking of deep thinking.

In the Pixar rules of storytelling, they talk about how, when you’re brainstorming what should happen next, the first thing you think is usually obvious or overdone. So you have to put that on the list of things and keep going until the third or the fourth or fifth idea you have and that’s the one that will have the most impact. In both life and storytelling, tendency is to stop on #1. I have often taken things at face value and not questioned them too much before believing them or using them. While I do think I have the capability of thinking deeply and examining things, I have never had the will (something I have carried deep shame about).

It’s time to take a gentle detour into my religious trauma.

Thanks to a conversation the other day with my bestie Karis, I realized that so much of this tendency in my life is thanks to growing up in evangelical Christianity. Until I was well into my twenties, I was taught to have faith over reason—and even against reason. I was taught that my mind and my senses could be telling me one thing, but I had to believe that those weren’t reality. This is a huge reason why it took me until I was almost 30 to realize I was queer. In fact, queerness is the first thing that I really thought deeply about and chose to believe what my own senses were telling me over what I had been taught. This conversation with Karis, which I will be speaking to my therapist about the next time I see her, gave me a lot of compassion for myself. Since I’ve left that belief system, so many of those deeply engrained patterns still have their claws in me. For example, I am really excellent at remembering things without actually having to think about the context of them. Maybe it stems from all my summers at Vacation Bible School memorizing so many bible verses and reciting them without a single thought for what they actually meant. I could also go into depth about how my thinking avoidance plays into my avoidance of having opinions.1 This has been so hard for me to unlearn, because what if I have an opinion and I’m wrong! or someone disagrees!! or I look stupid!!! Unlearning all these things is a bitch and I am making my therapist lots of money.

tl;dr — Deconstructing the thing you’ve believed since you were literally in the womb is no easy task folks.

End of religious trauma detour, back to regularly scheduled programming

This habit of not thinking deeply about things really pops up in so many inconvenient ways, and trying to write in a new genre is only the most recent. It goes hand in hand with my desire to not be bad at things, because when you think deeply about something, you’re also opening yourself up to admitting you don’t know.

Working on werewolf romcom, I have learned just enough to get by and I have been pushing forward with that “good enough” belief clasped tightly in my fingers. When I stop and think about the genre and the tropes and the nuances of what I’m trying to say with this book—I have to admit that I have a huge learning curve ahead of me still.

Now, this isn’t to say that every book or project or moment requires this deep examination/learning curve. Sometimes things get to be easy and that’s great. But I am currently aspiring to really let myself dig into things and let the learning curve take the time it takes.

At what point do I give up?

Like I mentioned in my detour, my tendency is often to skim and move on, but I’m slowly rewiring that in my brain and one of the biggest ways I’m doing that is by asking for help.

Quick story time — this last fall, I started a sourdough journey. And by started I mean, I tried to make a sourdough starter from scratch. It did not work, partly because I didn’t learn enough (I thought I was good enough lol) and I tried to keep Regina alive for so long and she just never gave me a loaf of bread. My fiancee, Skye, kept asking if I should get an established starter from someone else, but that felt SO much like admitting I was bad at it. So I was stuck with an unusable starter, not willing to admit I didn’t know enough about how to fix it and also not willing to admit I needed help. Well, I finally did get a starter from someone and I am making my first bread with her (we named her Loafia Vergara) and she is already soooo much better. She is bubbly and sour and beautiful and wow, I could’ve been having great bread for the last three months if I’d just… asked for help? Who knew? (Everyone but me, apparently.)

So, I’m trying to take that energy into other areas of my life. I’m learning to read more closely and really think about how those things apply to my own writing. I want to study and learn and have a good time doing it. And lucky for me, I have some really smart friends who love to study. Here are some people I’m leaning on to cultivate these habits in myself:

Anna Mercier and Lyssa Mia Smith on the Turning To Story Podcast— they are constantly examining new craft tools and different elements of the process and I love how they make looking closely at something feel so fun.

Emily Charlotte — she always has such thoughtful takes in her substack posts and I love her Marginalia posts on instagram.

I also would be wrong if I didn’t shout out my friend Karis Rogerson’s new podcast The Write Way of Life. I’ve been hearing about this podcast as she and her fellow creators have been prepping and recording and the first full length episode drops this week. They are doing deep dives into different sections of writing craft with each episode and I am SO excited to learn from them and their truly incredible guests.

So… what am I even saying with all of this?

I feel like I spent a lot of time in this newsletter being like “wow I suck,” and I just wanted to state for the record that I don’t think that’s true. I am just processing (in your inboxes, sorry) the things I feel embarrassed about and figuring out how to grow and cultivate habits I want in my life.