DAY TWENTY NINE

I'm a failure, A dumkopf. Useless. 

I've certainly had that thought when something I've been working on hasn't worked out quite as planned, but was it ever justified, and does it help in any way to berate oneself in such a fashion?

In the world this blog exists and for the people it is aimed at, failure really shouldn't be such a problem. More often than not one can simply start over, and chalk the whole thing up to experience. You will have learnt something from it and are unlikely to fail in precisely the same way again. At worst you will have wasted some time, materials, and may have to buy that Christmas present rather than handing over a lovingly (or determinedly) made piece of work. 

Those investments will be quickly forgotten and in any case are not at the root of most people's sense of failure. The investment that causes the problem is the investment of oneself, our identity, our pride, our sense of self-efficacy, which refers to the set of beliefs we hold about our ability to complete a particular task. That can be much harder to deal with, for some people at least. 

It may seem a little paradoxical then that art and crafts are also used in a therapeutic capacity. People with depression, anxiety, or who just want to improve their sense of wellbeing have all been shown to benefit - indeed you can have arts or crafts prescribed by your doctor in some places, which is a great thing.
 
At root, whether you end up kicking yourself or revelling in a sense of flow, peace and accomplishment is partly a matter of how well something turns out, but perhaps more so, the attitude with which you approach the piece of work, particularly if your main aim is to do it for pleasure. 
 
My suggestion is to try to approach things with a sense of curiosity above all, rather than have a fixed idea of what the end result should be and what your place in it's accomplishment ought to be. Leaving room for the happy accidents, learning from the process even if you've done it dozens of times before, and allowing the piece to tell you how it wants to be may result in pleasant surprises.

And you can always blame the work rather than yourself for getting it wrong if you don't like the results!

Onwards...expectantly.

 
Picture credit: B.P. Schulberg Productions / Preferred Pictures, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
 


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