When I was in sixth grade, I took art classes on Tuesdays after school. We worked on lots of drawing and sketching skills, so after a few classes, I felt like I had it down. Until things took a turn for the worse.
When I arrived to class one memorable Tuesday afternoon, our art teacher had set up oil paints and canvases. She told us we were going to sketch a rough outline of a picture and then add detail with paints. However, I took this suggestion a little too seriously. I painstakingly drew a detailed sketch of the two horses I planned on painting. When I was finally ready to add some color, the paint dissolved my pencil marks and ruined my carefully made plan.
I was devastated. All that work gone to waste, with nothing to show for it but an ugly, barely touched painting. I gave up on the horses, and I didn’t paint after that. I pretty much freaked out, overwhelmed and frustrated with the process. I compared myself to others and assumed I could never be good at painting. It didn’t come easily to me, so I gave up, submitted to defeat.
As you can probably tell, I definitely took the whole situation a little too seriously. I overreacted when things didn’t go my way, overwhelmed by the raw frustration of the situation. However, my minor fifth-grade painting dilemma is symbolic of a larger challenge we frequently face. We have a tendency to run away from tasks that prove frustrating. We get discouraged easily and give up. It doesn’t matter if it’s something we could enjoy. It doesn’t matter if it’s a skill that takes time to develop. Frustration can be so powerful that it prevents us from moving forward. We associate it with failure, and when things don’t work out cleanly or come easily, we assume something must be wrong with us.
There is a lot of danger in getting discouraged too quickly. It can stifle passion, create a sense of helplessness and even cause us to give up entirely. For instance, we may get excited about an idea we have for a video project. But when we lack the skills to execute it, we consider it a failure. Or, when we are tasked with meaningless assignments at work — you know, your average coffee-fetching situation — we might interpret our frustration as a lack of motivation or purpose. Sometimes we get so caught up in doing everything perfectly that we don’t recognize the learning experience that comes out of the discomfort.
Take “awkward middle school phases,” for example — a very real phenomenon. Middle school tends to include insecurity, social pressure and cringey attitudes. When our friend tells us that she hated some movie, we tell her we hated it, too. When we trip and fall in the middle of the hallway, our world comes crashing down for a minute. Throw braces and experimental hairstyles and fragile self-esteem into the mix, and you get one of the most frustrating periods of life. And yet, we needed to go through it to become who we are today. We depended on our middle school experimentation and frustration to grow, succeed and thrive. So even though frustration can be daunting and discouraging, it can actually be part of a process that allows us to see our own thoughts more clearly.
Practice, retry and give yourself time to succeed. Don’t let the frustration scare you away. In the long run, it can actually provide us with clarity and allow for all-around improvement.
If only I had recognized that in sixth grade. Maybe then I would have enjoyed painting. Or, at the very least, saved myself from the embarrassing memory of throwing nothing short of a tantrum in the middle of painting class. Don’t let frustration win.
