I think I am pretty even-keeled normally, but I have an Achilles' heel - crafts. Like needlework, crochet, painting, etc. If I can't understand how to do something the first time I try to learn it, I tend to freak out. Especially if people around me pick up whatever we are learning quickly, and my project is a jumbled mess. Which is often the case. I just get so frustrated.
Example: my friend Tori tried to teach a few of us how to crochet back in college. I couldn't get it no matter how I tried and I started to cry. She was like, "Whoa, there, that's too intense of a reaction for yarn." Well, she didn't say that per se, but I could tell she was thinking it.
What can I say, I'm sensitive, I guess. And a perfectionist, at least when it comes to crafts. The rest of my life is sort of slapdash, but you have to have some priorities.This Sunday I went to a knitting class with another friend. We were supposed to learn how to make a scarf with a striped pattern. It was advertised as an easy project, yet involved complicated phrases like "yarn over" and "pearl." Wait, that's a basic one. Anyway, I started over from scratch three times, and on the fourth time, my scarf was still wrong. That was the final straw.
So... I basically threw a little knitting tantrum. "I quit!!!" I exclaimed and dramatically started unraveling the scarf. Needles and balls of yarn went flying. All the kindly knitting ladies thought I was seriously unhinged. They weren't wrong.
I think about this a lot - is the key to life avoiding things that you are bad at? This is problematic as I am bad at most things.Or is that terrible advice and you'll never learn anything that way? But why should I try to make a difficult scarf that is going to make me feel like stabbing people with knitting needles, when I could make a basic one that I already know how to do? Aren't hobbies supposed to be fun?
