This Is Why You Should Try Something You’re Bad At

I’m having a Bed-In.

John and Yoko style. It’s a week off for writing. Not the money writing (though that is always welcome), writing for the ART.

Did you write baaaaad poetry as a teenager?

I didn’t.

Nope.

Not me.

I saved that creative exercise for when I was in my early twenties.

A fully fledged adult. Grown up. Of legal age: for smoking, drinking and triple XXX.

Rather than exploit those wonderful opportunities, I chose to get down and dirty with my diary. That yes, was a black bound Moleskine.

The poetry confession gets worse. It rhymed. Purposefully. I used a dictionary to find those similar sounding words, feeling like a twenty first century Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Back to the Bed- In. Tomorrow is Monday and I have laid out a fresh pair of pajamas. The plan is to wake up, shower and redress in these lilac scented cotton garments (simple clean and fresh), shake out the duvet and get back in. Solo. To type. I’m not promoting world peace, just massaging my imaginative ego. I could do with a Teasmaid (this genius retro invention that makes cups of tea for you from the bedside table) however, I didn’t think so far ahead. Moving the kettle upstairs to my bedroom will have to suffice.

The point to the poetry?

I didn’t graduate from college (and barley high school, though that’s another story) so you know, I’m no authority on this but man, these kids, they’ve got pressure ya know? And I am being serious. Not sarcastic.

They got bills, bills, bills. Big ones. (By bills I mean those scary never gonna pay it back student loans where it is best to emigrate and cease to mention again).

And when you’ve got the pressure of those bills, it feels as though you can’t be bad, bad, bad. At anything. To be bad at writing rhyming verse poetry.

But the bad poetry got me somewhere.

It taught me: how not to write.

Which means, I now write and get paid for it.

So, the moral of this story is to pick up a pen RIGHT NOW and give yourself permission to craft a super stalker-creepy prose about the guy you dated for three months that you weren’t even that in to.

Or start whatever else you’ve been wanting to try but felt scared too because you weren’t good at it yet.