*Note: this draft is very bad, I wrote it an hour before class on a day when most people didn’t even have a complete draft, and I am writing a completely new, different, better essay as I type this. Leaving this garbage draft here for posterity and to remind myself how it feels to ramble pointlessly around a bad idea.*

I believe in being bad at things.

Yes, I believe that productivity, excellence, and ambition are the virtues that keep the cogs of our societal machine turning. But being bad at something isn’t always a means to an end. It shouldn’t have to be a place where I don’t enjoy what I am doing, because I am angry with myself for not being better, or wistfully waiting for an improvement that lies ahead.

I believe in embracing the moment when one is bad at things. Sometimes, it’s good to just say whatever words are coming out of your mouth without trying to refine them into something perfect. There is a beauty in the raw vulnerability of imperfection. Sometimes that imperfection is a stop on the road to brilliance. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes you know that, considering the amount of time and effort you will likely commit to it, you might never be as good at something as you want to be, and that isn’t a personal vice.

When I was fourteen, I was possessed by some unholy desire to acquire and play a musical saw.

If you don’t know, a musical saw is a large handsaw that makes a wailing noise when you play it along its non-toothed end with a very well-rosined cello bow. I say “noise” because rational people don’t call this music. Unless you are one of the top musical saw players in the world, playing an incredibly acoustically convenient handsaw, the sound that comes out of this activity is likely to be incredibly awful. It’s sort of like an acoustic theremin, if a theremin had to take a breath between every other note that sounds like the scratching of a thousand nails on a crumbling chalkboard as a chorus of furious cats fought in the distance.

I was fooled by the beauty of musical saw players playing along with an orchestra’s heart-rending rendition of Ave Maria. Somehow, I thought I could make that abomination of an instrument sound good.

Weeks passed. I got my handsaw. I terrified the neighborhood children, who had decided there was an undead spirit of some kind making those awful sounds. It did not get any better. I didn’t practice as much as I wanted to. Did it make a difference? Doubtful. It seems like the musical saw is just a disgusting, difficult instrument and that we as a society should all move on from subjecting poor cheaply-made cello bows to the task of stroking unwieldy, rusting tools.

Or maybe, had I practiced more, I would have gotten into it. Maybe I would have discovered the secret combination for making the musical saw sound good. I don’t know, because it hasn’t happened yet, and improving my musical saw abilities is low on my list of priorities for 2020. It was a whimsical idea that fell on its face. For a summer I penciled saw practice time into my schedule and grew angrier and angrier with myself with each day that I avoided saw practice for other things. In retrospect, I cringe. Why should I feel guilty for not being good at something? Why should I feel guilty for the fact that I will never be good at it?

I had my experience. I attempted to play the musical saw. It sounded terrible. I found a few gigs getting paid to do it anyway; in fact, I believe my first-ever paid gig was playing Mo Bamba on the musical saw. I made four dollars and the memory makes me cringe, but someone actually requested that and was willing to pay all of four dollars for it. The fact that the recording literally sends a shudder down my spine is not my problem.

This failure wasn’t any sort of meaningful step on a greater journey. It didn’t motivate me to keep trying. It didn’t directly lead me to bigger and better things. It was just something I will probably never be good at. The musical saw serves very little purpose in my life, apart from being my go-to answer for “tell me a fun fact about yourself” icebreakers. But maybe that’s okay. It is not a moral failure to do something poorly and not make the effort to do it well.