#32: Quitting Is The Win (Sometimes)

How I wanted to do something for years, quit 3 weeks in, and am glad I quit so quickly.

So excited to introduce audio narration of the essay portion of these issues— hope you enjoy!

“It even has a semi-finished detached garage!” I detailed to J, while recounting my first visit to our soon-to-be California home, 2+ years ago. “Maybe I can finally put a pottery wheel in there, and who knows, my dream of being a ceramic artist that makes the most beautiful mugs will be the turning of the tide, when we move to California!”

I had long flirted with the idea of abandoning my current career to fully indulge myself in becoming an artist, doing something tactile with my hands. This may come as a shock to those who don’t know my history, but I’ve always taken arts classes, and one of my favorite studies I’ve ever completed was a summer studio arts program at Brown that was also a residency at RISD. And everything that ceramicists described wheel-throwing to be seemed to be precisely aligned with not only my skill set, but also what I typically feel rewarded by doing: precision in technique, discipline, and creative freedom to play with the rules once you got a hang of the basics. I am a former figure-skater, after all.

It took over a year of work being extremely busy, time and funds dedicated to our wedding, lots of ups and downs with my Endo, but I finally found a ceramics studio a short drive away from our house to take beginners classes at. Quickly learning that the demand for these lessons was high, and that classes often sold out within minutes, I queued up my browser right at 11:59am on a Tuesday to snag my spot. Just as elated as I was to make it into a college course I was really interested in, I counted down the days to the start of classes, four weeks from then.

Arriving to the studio in the outfit I deemed splatter-worthy of clay, I eagerly took my seat at the wheel I felt called to for so long. A lump of clay in hand, I plopped down on a stool and watched the instructor walk through the basics of centering and coning.

At first it felt exhilarating to feel the wheel, that I had watched carefully in so many videos, spinning underneath my forearms, to finally have my hands in clay, and to have that tactile creative experience we’re so often starved for in the tedium of day-to-day adult life. I carefully centered and coned, somewhat successfully (but with much room for improvement), and was surprised that it was much more of a core and arm workout than I expected.