📍 in learning rehab

I’ve been a chronic skill-hopper since I was a kid.

When I was little, I went to Chinese dance lessons for 5 months, cooking classes for 3, and singing lessons for 1. Unsurprisingly, I never mastered any of these skills.

I bounced around from skill to skill freely with no pressure or guilt… until I entered my teenage years, when I realized that all of my friends had specialized in the talents they started learning as kids. One friend played the piano since they were 4 years old, the other one danced since they were 6, and the other one learned to code when they were 10.

All of the sudden, I felt like I was too late to learn any of these things.

I couldn’t learn how to sing at 16 because I should’ve done that at age 7. I couldn’t learn how to code at 25 because I should have done that in college. I set invisible boundaries of what I was and wasn’t capable of. As the years passed, the list of things I wanted to learn shrunk under the looming notion that I was always behind.

Sick of the self-inflicted doubt, I screwed the idea that prevented me from learning and I raided my local adult community center — I signed up for ukulele lessons, online flower arranging classes, language courses, attended weekend conferences, and started learning Python.

Within the span of 7 months, I tried to learn 5 new skills on top of having a job, a family, a relationship, and a passion project.

Very dumb? Yes.

By the end of the 7 months, I was burnt out. Every single one of my learning goals fizzled out until I was back to square one.

I struggled with subtle twinges of guilt for giving up — seeing my untouched ukulele or unopened language book felt like small reminders of defeat.

But instead of thinking of each endeavor as a standalone fail, I decided to look at the last 7 months in a different way — kind of like a roadtrip. A roadtrip where sometimes you’re driving at 100 mph and then your car runs out of gas or you hit a slowdown on the highway. All in all, the roadtrip isn’t perfectly linear, but it’s still a trip of a lifetime.

So in honor of reaching June, the halfway point of 2024, I drew a “roadmap” to commemorate every skill I’ve tried to learn so far. Maybe in the second half of 2024 (the second page that is still blank), I’ll continue to learn one or two of these skills to round out this year’s roadtrip.

P.S. I’m not a great drawer but whatever! :)