Allure and danger of having potential

I read an Instagram post a long long time of screenshots from book pages that talked about a certain way some people engage with their potentials. I really wish I knew which book it was. (It was a book in a Korean language. Whether it was written originally in Korean or translated into Korean, I sadly do not know) I am also writing this with a distant memory, so that’s a disclaimer for possible discrepancies between my understanding and the actual context.

What I read shocked me. The book shared that people become content with the fact that they have potential. They don’t put themselves through the grueling trial and error to experience the milestones through failures and successes. It’s enough to know that they have a gift that they will always have, never to expire.

Why do they do that? It’s because untested potentials can always shine even a little without the risk of being made invalid through testing it.

Let’s say there is a child artist who rakes in praises and awards from her school for her art without really trying. She is confident and makes it her life dream to become a professional artist. She takes more advanced art classes and goes to university to study art. Mixed with self-denial and gradual acceptance, she realizes that other kids are so much better than her and that she can’t seem to improve beyond what comes easy to her. The harder she tries, the more flaws she sees in her art. “Maybe I don’t have the talent anymore,” she may conclude.

Actually taking your gift out of the safe box and putting it to tests to become something bigger and better is extremely, extremely painful. Finding out that you are not as good as you thought or wished is extremely, extremely painful.

So people would rather keep their gifts wrapped up safe and sound in their soft hearts and tell the tale of their little sleeping giants to friends and families and take it out for a little show here and there. It’s easier, it’s safer, it’s more controllable. Yes, regret may be the permanent side effect to this choice. Maybe some let that go too to paint this picture as something beautiful and nostalgic and long away gone.

Nobody teaches you how to endure the pain from the growth process. Nobody picks you up when you fail. Nobody holds your hand to next guarantee of success when you taste it for the first time. It’s a really difficult journey that calls for resilience, reaching out for help, getting support from those who really cares, being ready for opportunities, luck, self-direction, and probably a lot of other things to help you keep going.

After reading this, I felt as thought I was looking at myself in the mirror. For how long I have been calling myself a writer and artist when I have barely created works of my own art? When I come across stories of currently active artists who say that they have been drawing or writing since childhood, I marvel at how they never loosened their grip on their craft. I wish I had done that. I got frustrated at myself for not being able to accurately translate my vision onto the papers. I berated myself for not being skillful enough to succeed on the first try.

But I know why I didn’t do that growing up, and that’s my personal journey of self-forgiveness. While reading this post gave me a a sense of clarity, I also took it as an opportunity to understand logically and compassionately why I didn’t make my art and what art means to me and what I want to do about it.

It doesn’t always have to be an “it’s just the way it is” kind of a story.

As far as I know, I want to write my stories and paint my pictures. I have a lot of ideas, and I want to create them. And the logical truth I keep telling myself is that I should be ready to make a lot of awful works before I can make a good one. Overcome the fear of failure by failing a lot. Overcome the fear of perfectionism by creating with imperfections. It’s these that were so hard for me, and I struggled a lot with. Even if I may turn out to be not that great of a writer and not that great of an artist, I want to spend the day working on things that mean to me and giving it my best. I won’t know where I could be in the future to without living each moment in the present first.

Potentials are truly a gift. We get it without asking for it. Through blood, nurture, environment, we discover something we can do easily without trying. How much it means to our lives can change over time, and that is okay. It is not wrong to let it take a back seat and chill with you instead of training it hard to make it an Olympian (Paris Olympics is going wild as I write, hence the reference).

Whatever we choose to do with our gifts, I hope we do it with intention. I hope we forgive ourselves and muster the courage to make our next moves.