Sometimes, I wonder about the lost potential when, at 10 years old, I gave up my knitting classes after three weeks of “grueling” effort. Anytime I scroll and see a girl making the cutest knit tops on TikTok, I think about how I could have recreated them if I had not given up on that fleeting hobby.
At that time, sitting in on the classes, trying desperately to knit with two oversized rose gold needles that were two sizes too big for my hands, and yarn that was thicker than it needed to be for my beginner status, I watched as everyone around me was knitting away furiously and felt so left behind. I did not like that feeling, and at my young age, I walked away because feeling like I was behind was worse for me to linger on than the idea that I could master a new skill with just a little more effort.
In that moment, quitting knitting did not really bother me. I was 10 years old and thought I had my entire life set out to do the hobbies that a grandma would. At my present age of 20, I want to go back in time and kick my younger self for starting to seed the mentality that I had to be perfect at everything I did without giving myself the proper time to try and grow that skill.
Not only did the act of giving up on my knitting class stem from a need for perfection, but it also resulted in this pressure that I set for myself as a student, as a sister, and as a daughter. Classes became less about learning because I loved to learn, and more about performing because I had to be the best. I could not fall behind anyone else in my class, or I would just give up on trying in that subject.
It hit me in grade 10 when suddenly math became so difficult for me. Instead of trying to get better and asking my parents for help, I chose to deflect and ignore, stashing my failed math tests into my locker and never giving them a second glance. Never allowing myself the chance to learn from my mistakes because I simply just “had to do better next time.”
Until grade 12, I continued in this tumultuous mindset, afraid to make any step out of line. I did not snap out of this toxic mindset until the stress of having to overperform resulted in lost nights of sleep, picking the skin around my fingers until they stung, and forgetting to take care of myself so much that my mom noticed something was not right. Then, we had an enlightening conversation where I allowed myself to be fully honest with myself, and with her and she told me these words that constantly revolve around my mind:
“You are so afraid of falling short of perfection that you have stopped allowing yourself to try. But how will you ever know what you are capable of if you never give yourself the chance to learn?”
She was not telling me to stop striving for perfection or excellence, but she was reminding me that I would never achieve those things if I did not stop being afraid of the process that actually gets me there. And she was right. The pressure to be perfect at something stopped me from pursuing so many activities that, looking back now, I know I would have excelled at. I think back to the countless times I have missed out on riding a bike because I thought that the learning period for me to learn how to ride a bike was long gone. So, I just had to tough it out and walk everywhere because I could not admit to never having ridden a bike and not knowing how to.
I have seen this reflected in so many areas of society throughout the years. More and more of my peers with whom I have spoken state that they have lost the pleasure of learning academically and use AI to answer their quizzes and homework because it is not about learning something anymore; it is about being perfect and measuring our worth as a number on the grading scale.
Places of higher education judge us on what we have to offer them, not in substance, but in figures on a page. Jobs judge us on the credentials we own, the schools we have gone to, and the privileges earned on different levels of struggle. We have lost the joy of learning something just to learn it, of picking up a new hobby not to add it as a credit to your résumé or extracurricular portfolio that you discuss in interviews when applying to your dream schools. When did being a beginner become a lost art?
Fast forward 10 years from the knitting experience, I finally pushed myself to learn how to ride a bike. Literally three weeks ago. I was cornered by a new friend and basically given the gift of being taught how to ride it in the most stress-free environment I could have ever imagined. But it was so stressful.
I could not stop falling off the bike because being in the air with my feet off the ground, depending on a moving mechanical machine with no control, was terrifying to me. It was so hard for me to get out of my own head because even if I had managed to ride the bike 50 metres, I would still tell myself I was going to fall, and eventually, I fell.
I was setting myself up for failure because even after all the mental growth I had done over the years, the idea of giving up was easier to me than struggling through the challenge of learning something new for pleasure. There was no academic reward, no credit to my CV, nothing I would gain monetarily or academically from picking up this skill, so my brain did not find any value in it.
But my friend did not give up on me. She pushed me to take my mind off the idea of falling, the idea of failing, and told me to focus on my surroundings. Every time we would ride by, she would ask me to focus on what colour a house was, what clothes a pedestrian was wearing, and even hum songs to distract me.
And guess what? The distraction worked.
Humming the song got my head off the idea of failure, and I allowed myself to look up and ahead of me and appreciate the beautiful surroundings that I was missing when I was so locked into the “what-ifs” of potentially failing.
This experience taught me that we focus so much on the outcome of something, an outcome of a hobby, an outcome of trying a new skill, that we forget to enjoy the process of learning it. The ups and downs that come with it. We forget we do not have to always do something for academic honour; sometimes, you can do hobbies and learn something new just because you want to.
And when I look back at that 10 year old version of me sitting in that knitting class, with rose gold needles two sizes too big for my fingers, surrounded by others furiously knitting away, their needles clacking above the sound of their voices gossiping to one another, I would tell her to just. keep. trying.