What If It's Supposed To Be Hard?

Over the weekend, in a conversation with my therapist, I came to a particular conclusion about the world.

It was this: things are so fucked up in our world that the infrastructure of our lives is now, in and of itself, a particular — and particularly noxious — lie. This post is for identifying and dismantling it.

First, some evidence.

I drew this picture of my friend Jim Lindsay in the summer of 2019:

And I drew this one last night, this morning, and during my lunch break:

There are still plenty of weaknesses in the more recent one, including that I got out my precision eraser a bit too late to put enough gray hair in his beard. But it’s very good, and it’s a remarkable improvement from seven years ago.

What's better: the eyes actually hold light now — there are real catchlights and a sense of moisture instead of flat dark circles, which is the difference between “eyes” and “a drawing of eyes.” The values go fuller in both directions; I let the darks in the beard and hair get properly dark instead of hedging, and the result reads as three-dimensional instead of shaded-in. And the edges are under control. Nothing is outlined too hard the way the face on the older, cartoon-y portrait was, so the whole thing sits on the page instead of floating on top of it.

Something changed between the two. What?

Did I get a special visit from the Talent Fairy after leaving a sufficient number of pencil shavings under my pillow?

Did Hagrid come from Hogwarts and tell me I was a witch all along, but now I’m too old for Hogwarts, so here’s some Talent Potion?

Did my DNA get resequenced by a lab that specialized in “talent” and forgot to CC me on the consent form?

No, of course not. The only thing that changed was me. I practiced.

In the summer of 2019, I was preparing for what would turn out to be an unusually fucked-up senior year of college, majoring in math. I was in real need of a break, so I limited myself to two hours of Khan Academy and some used-Amazon-textbook vector calculus problems to stay “in shape,” but otherwise I was mostly just drawing.

I finished college, got a job, got a better job. In the last seven years, a lot of things have happened. COVID, of course, but also a depression that almost resulted in my dying by suicide, the devastating loss of my friend Adam, and, currently, the demoralizing, axis-shifting realization that I’ve almost certainly experienced a permanent loss in my ability to extend trust. (Though I do realize there are worse alternatives.)

But through it all — I was drawing.

Not every day, but almost every day. And even on the days I wasn’t drawing, I was practicing how to see — noticing the angles in the road as I explored Vermont, asking myself how I’d draw them to show this as the focal point vs that.

Absolutely nothing changed except the slow, sometimes-tedious, sometimes-painful building of skill through practice, repetition, and autodidact (a fancy world that means “self-taught”) devotion.

This is the same way I got good at math, after starting off so far behind that I learned what a logarithm was on the first day of logarithmic differentiation in calculus. It is the same way I am teaching an 11-year-old to get good at math — mostly by ignoring the bullshit her school is ramming down her throat and helping her find her own way to learn, with some guidance (but less than you probably think) from me.

What does this have to do with the very infrastructure of our society being a lie?

I am on record, and I stand by it today, ten toes down: talent is a myth that we have turned into a collective permission structure for excuses.

This myth should be dead, particularly given everything we now know about neuroplasticity: human brains can and do change. A lot.

But it got a new sales pitch, mostly from the same fuckwits who brought us Twitter, where human decency, and the capacity for it, go to die along with nuance — a platform that reliably takes good people and turns them into functional psychopaths, incentive by incentive, dunk by dunk.

And TikTok, which has turned human children into creatures who cannot stand movie day at school because paying attention to one thing for ninety minutes feels like torture. But mostly Twitter.1

And that sales pitch is this: if it were really for you, it would already feel good. It would feel good instantly, even before you’ve had time to notice that it doesn’t yet.

Not “you’ll get there.” Not “keep at it,” and certainly not “practice makes perfect.”

Already.

Because we’ve been trained by an infrastructure engineered to reward the first six seconds. We get the dopamine hit with the swipe, the like, the skim, and we’re feeling it before we’ve even had time to crave it.

Or we’re done.

If there’s the slightest gap, we don’t want it. And if it’s about an activity or, God help us all, a skill, then the gap before the dopamine hit is read as proof that it isn’t for us.

Boredom isn’t boredom anymore. It’s evidence.

And struggle isn’t struggle anymore; it’s a traumatic burden none of us expect ourselves or our children to bear.

So the talent myth? Yeah, it didn’t die.

It just got a makeover. Not an awesome one from the Queer Eye guys. A deceptive one from some tech bros with a Hollywood budget.

It used to say, “You weren’t born with this talent.”

Now it says, “If you were, it wouldn’t feel like this.”

Then it hands you a phone to make damn sure you never sit with the discomfort long enough to find out it was lying.

Nobody looking at 2019 Jim would have bet on 2026 Jim. Not even me.

The gap exists for one reason: I kept drawing anyway.

Our entire society is now set up to convince you of the insane, farcical lie that everything that doesn’t feel good immediately and easily is not worth your time, energy, and effort.

That the discomfort of becoming good at something is evidence that you never could be.

Don’t mistake the gap for the verdict.

Stay in the gap.