It's okay

[u/Justthisdudeyaknow]

[u/Milkyway_Potato]

But what if my brain gives me a bad grade in Hobby? :(

Nah for real though. Just. Be bad at shit. Not to get all motivational poster about it, but if you're literally the worst person alive at a given thing, that still means you put more effort into it than the millions of people who have never done it at all.

I'm learning CW right now, and I'm absolutely dogshit, but I do not care. It's not my job, I have no obligation to be an expert at it. Hell, that's just a good rule of thumb for most things in life. Don't force yourself to become an expert simply because "amateur" doesn't feel good enough.

[u/Marillenbaum → u/Milkyway_Potato]

Pivot the goal: get a good grade at learning to divorce skill from enjoyment. Genuinely, as a young person I decided that if I was an uptight perfectionist, I was going to try applying it to becoming emotionally healthy, up to and including practicing dismantling my perfectionism.

[u/Milkyway_Potato → u/Marillenbaum]

Good on you for being able to recognize your perfectionism as an issue to overcome. I wore it like a badge of honor for way too long.

It's honestly still weird to just... enjoy things I'm bad at. I no longer feel like I'm actively dying while doing them, but there's still that persistent feeling of "jesus christ I hope I get better at this" and I have to tell my own brain to shut the fuck up.

[u/SadisticPawz → u/Milkyway_Potato]

I personally try and find amusement in my own failures. It works to laugh through all the pain of fucking things up until I find myself actually focusing and doing the thing. Doesnt feel as bad maybe

[u/ARussianW0lf → u/Milkyway_Potato]

but if you're literally the worst person alive at a given thing, that still means you put more effort into it than the millions of people who have never done it at all.

But then the people around will know that I'm the worst at that thing and they'll think less of me

[u/Upbeat_Effective_342 → u/ARussianW0lf]

That's where you get to be so unruffled they're impressed how good you are at not giving a shit ;)

Really though. It's a genuinely tough fear, and the only way to win against people who would directly or passively say they think less of you is to be unaffected by their opinion. It's only bad to be bad at something if you feel bad about it. It's only embarrassing if you feel embarrassed. Real masters of not giving a fuck can turn it around and make the judger feel foolish for judging.

[u/ARussianW0lf → u/Upbeat_Effective_342]

That's where you get to be so unruffled they're impressed how good you are at not giving a shit

Due to events in my childhood I cannot simply choose to do this but thanks tho it does sound wonderful. The only thing I'd be impressing anyone with is how someone can be bad at literally every single thing imaginable

Really though. It's a genuinely tough fear, and the only way to win against people who would directly or passively say they think less of you is to be unaffected by their opinion.

And the only way to be unaffected by people's opinions is to have a foundation of confidence built upon knowing that there are in fact people with very high opinions of you. I don't have that

[u/Upbeat_Effective_342 → u/ARussianW0lf]

Yup, I completely agree. It's a very difficult skill to learn when circumstances have transpired to prevent it from developing naturally.

[u/JSConrad45 → u/Upbeat_Effective_342]

Try spite

[u/SadisticPawz → u/ARussianW0lf]

That is definitely NOT the only way

source: I just stopped caring over time.

Or at the very least, the confidence can be built on something OTHER than people having high opinions on you

[u/PoniesCanterOver → u/Milkyway_Potato]

What's CW?

[u/Milkyway_Potato → u/PoniesCanterOver]

CW stands for "continuous wave", which is ham radio speak for Morse code.

[u/PoniesCanterOver → u/Milkyway_Potato]

Oh nice, I've always wanted to do that stuff. Have fun

[u/MenoEnhancedADHDgrrl → u/Milkyway_Potato]

Just. Be bad at shit.

Absolutely on my top 10 list of rules to live your life by. Many years ago, I wanted to start making altered journals out of old books but I did not have any idea what I was doing and so I named my first book "the ugly book" and told myself that if anything looked good then it was unintentional cuz the intent is just to make ugly art (at least I could learn how not to do it in the future.) And now I'm proud of the work that I do today.

And I have a really horrible time implementing any kind of organizational system for my life: to do lists or calendars, agendas, bullet journals, you name it, I've tried it and I just keep struggling. But I'm not going to quit and I just started another system and I was starting to get frustrated and on the second day I told myself I was going to do it badly because I had already been working on it for a while and needed to get started on my project at work and had a moment of frustration. I chose to give myself permission to do it badly instead of giving into the never ending urge to punish myself for not achieving perfection.

If you're anything like me you think it must be perfect. You would probably argue with me that you have any choice in choosing to do it less than perfect. I used to think that for so long too. But if you take some time to think about where the messages of perfection are coming from and whose voice that really is you may begin to realize, as I did, that it was 99% my own voice and I could let it go. (Learning how to let go is still a lot of hard work so I'm not saying it's easy but once you finally at least see that you have the choice, doors begin to open up and things get easier. I don't know if they ever get easy. We are ADHD after all 😉)

[u/NoNeuronNellie]

I'm gonna say a bunch of slurs in public

Edit: stab wounds :(

[u/Upbeat_Effective_342 → u/NoNeuronNellie]

Good job being a go getter and trying something outside your comfort zone!

[u/NoNeuronNellie → u/Upbeat_Effective_342]

Oh, shut up, you remembers stab wounds ...normal person I respect

[u/ScaredyNon → u/NoNeuronNellie]

if this was a shitty novel:

"Oh, shut up you- Agh!" Like a bolt out of the blue, a searing pain erupted all across his body, floods of agony battering against his skin and muscles. It felt cold, sharp, metallic, like, like a knife. At first, the person didn't realise what gave birth to this sudden arousement of his nociceptors, but then the realisation hit him like a bullet train pulverising a suicidal Japanese office worker into a fine, polite mist: it was the slurs.

The images of the event played out in front of the male's eye spheres as if it was a YouTube video. The man shut his eyes tight, like he was going to squeeze his two white orbs to make eye-monade, and shook his head to remove the memory from his mind screen. The guy couldn't ever say slurs again, not again, not ever, ever ever, after that event. The dude decidedly let out a bellowing sigh, and resumed construction of his sentence.

"...you normal person I respect."

[u/rubexbox → u/ScaredyNon]

No mention of women Breasting Boobily? 0/10.

[u/BalefulOfMonkeys → u/NoNeuronNellie]

human, I remember you’re stab wounds

[u/Milkyway_Potato → u/BalefulOfMonkeys]

Human, I remember you're racial slurs

[u/BalefulOfMonkeys]

On the topic of Mental Health Advice That Sounds Overused but Has a Point:

To Whom it May Concern,

“It’s not real, it can’t hurt you anymore” was not supposed to be about whoever or whatever hurt you in the first place. It’s about whatever situations or places continue to trigger you after the fact, despite them only being tangentially related to the trauma. You have so much more control over that than you do the past. If you’re up to some homemade exposure therapy, go for it.

Sincerely,

Somebody who spent over a year scared of their fucking kitchen before figuring this shit out last night

[u/void_juice → u/BalefulOfMonkeys]

I used my phone in my living room for the first time last week. The living room in my apartment where my family does not live. The apartment I have lived in for a year and a half. I’ve been irrationally afraid someone is going to yell at me for being lazy.

[u/Raincandy-Angel → u/BalefulOfMonkeys]

Tbf there ARE many scary things in the kitchen, as a child I watched a PSA where a woman slipped on oil and dumped a massive pot of boiling water all over herself and it showed all of the skin melting off of her face in graphic detail and I've been terrified of pots of boiling water since

[u/BalefulOfMonkeys → u/Raincandy-Angel]

Yeah, but no matter how nasty the dishes get, they’re not gonna tell me to kill myself

[u/rosiestinkie9 → u/BalefulOfMonkeys]

Hidden for annoying trauma dump! I wasn't taught to cook, and when I would try, I would get told that I was doing it wrong (instead of being taught how to do it right) and get stuff taken away from me. My mom did it when I was young, my sister did it when I was living with her as an adult, and even my husband did it a couple times. I am slower and kinda messy and scatterbrained when it comes to cooking, so eventually I just gave up completely. My husband will only get bagels and tater tots from me and has learned not to expect me to make meals. Sometimes I fantasize about living alone and being able to try in the kitchen without someone watching me or judging how I do things.

[u/Hummerous]

I realize this is tangential at best but

I work in an eye doctor's office, and we mostly deal with people over 80.

I can always tell when someone's retired from STEM when I take their eye exam and they sit there trying to Solve The Exam lol

[u/SadisticPawz → u/Hummerous]

Solve the exam how? What kind of exam is it?

[u/Unknown_Variable404 → u/SadisticPawz]

Not OP but I imagine they're trying to 'win' to 'beat' those eye exams they use to test for vision. E.g the one where the doctors ask you read out the letter you see. The exams are to see how bad your vision is or if you need glasses, so artifically trying to get a 'better score' makes it so you don't get the help you need.

I'm assuming this because I did the same thing in grade school 😭. We had eye exams at school (for some reason? I'm not sure if this is a common thing) No one told me this wasn't a graded exam so I 'cheated' by overhearing the answers of the people before me and memorizing the order.

So guess who struggled to see anything till late middle school when they got glasses 🙃

[u/Scairax]

That's how you get a good grade in enjoying things.

[u/Zamtrios7256 → u/Scairax]

Something that is both possible to achieve and healthy to want

[u/Stop-Hanging-Djs]

Even if you fuck up or fail something. Odds are it won't literally kill you. So you can usually keep trying till you don't suck or succeed

[u/ARussianW0lf]

But I don't want to be unlikable, then people won't like me :/

[u/PreviousLove1121]

sorry but decades of internalized trauma make this impossible for me

[u/ATN-Antronach]

But what if people hate it when you're not good at your hobbies? When you're not monetizing your hobbies? When you have hobbies at all?

[u/CookieSquire → u/ATN-Antronach]

Those people are weird and you shouldn’t respect their opinions.

[u/RepentantSororitas → u/CookieSquire]

Problem is those people are probably people you are very close to.

Don't pretend that you never said a song or a movie is absolute garbage. At the end of the day someone made that song. someone made that movie.

Someone made that one muffin that did not taste that good.

But we all know that at one point every single one of us has talked trash about someones craft. Something they probably put hours and hours of work into

Saying don't care about it is like telling a depressed person to just be happy. We're social creatures. We want acceptance within the tribe.

Like when it's your mom or even your partner saying hey your SoundCloud rap isn't that good at a certain point you just have to accept it.

[u/CookieSquire → u/RepentantSororitas]

I think we’re reading that comment very differently. If people “hate it when you’re not monetizing your hobbies,” that’s not about the quality of your work. Certainly people can be overly critical of your work, and maybe that hurts, but it’s something else entirely for people to judge you for spending your free time doing something you love.

I’ve said songs are garbage, but I’ve never wished that an amateur musician would stop making music they enjoyed making!

[u/RepentantSororitas → u/CookieSquire]

You're a saint and better than most people I have talked to then.

[u/Upbeat_Effective_342 → u/RepentantSororitas]

There's a book called The Courage to be Disliked, which I found helpful. Rather than telling a depressed person to be happy, the book takes the form of a dialogue in which a philosopher shares with a depressed student the way he himself learned how to be happy. It's not a perfect book, of course, but I've listened to the audiobook a few times and for me it's been comforting and given ideas that have been effective as I practice trying them.

[u/completelyunreliable]

but I want to be likable :(

[u/Raincandy-Angel]

Unfortunately in my experience if you're not good enough, then people leave you. I used to have artist friends but my art is still dogshit no matter how much I practice so they didn't invite me when they did art trades and the like..I literally got kicked out of a group I'd spent 2 years in for not having a good enough singing voice. They said I sounded unprofessional and I was holding them back.

If you're not good enough you will never be loved

[u/IllConstruction3450]

I’m not supposed to be a super genius that revolutionizes the world. I’m just some guy. It took me years to realize that. You shouldn’t tell kids they’re smart and let them dream big because that inevitably sets them up for failure. I simply wasn’t smart enough for science and letting go of your dreams and family/societal expectations is a heavy rock off your back.

[u/ventingandcrying]

But if I don’t “be” good enough then my mom will be mad at me… ohhhhh

[u/amondohk]

Now the only question is, was OP talking to someone else, or themselves?

[u/ResearcherTeknika]

Counterpoint: Self-Masochism

[u/ReverendEntity]

Tell that to my supervisors.

[u/LeebleLeeble]

Trying to practice art and drawing but I’m so bad its not even fun to try. Very demotivating to have such an insane imagination and having almost perfect mind imagery but it doesn’t come out on paper at all.

[u/GoodtimesSans]

It's funny because you know they're probably talking to themselves and trying to remove the damage school caused. 

Because I've been saying the same thing to myself.

[u/Leipurinen]

A book character I relate to is learning to play the flute and is really bad at it but also takes comfort in learning to play, which kinda makes me also want to learn to play only I don’t have a flute, so anyways here I am making one myself out of a pvc pipe so that I can learn to play bad too :)

[u/Zeitgeist1115]

As a writer, I often think of EL James for inspiration. If a search-and-replace Twilight smut fic can become a national sensation, anything is possible.

[u/Derino]

i should save this image and show it to someone, the next time someone scolds me for rolling on the ground wearing an alligator costume making happy creature noises.

[u/TheDrWhoKid]

misread it as listing a bunch of things I'm finding ways to do, and found it slightly less motivating than if there'd been a full stop after live your life

[u/ExplanationIll1938]

NO

[u/Lumpy-Helicopter-306]

I needed this