The Bitter Work of Stretching

Random musings from Avatar the Last Air bender and Doom scrolling on Instagram

I woke up this morning scrolling through instagram as my siblings got ready for school. There’s this meme of a four-year-old who just burst into tears with a pencil in hand. The caption? “All this because we asked her to write number 1”, and it got me thinking. Why is this such a universal experience? 

I remember my kid brother grabbing all our stationeries and doodling on the walls of our house, hell I remember doing it when I was his age (because the evidence waited for me to grow up a little haha), but the minute the adults say “Okay, its time to learn to do this, now write”; it becomes nerve-wracking, and daunting. By the time we’re in primary school writing our name is hardly a challenge anymore (save for the terrible handwriting but that’s not important).  

I remember my first day at junior secondary school, I was shy as expected and the day was much longer due to commute time, as you can imagine the workload was a lot more than I was used to and we had homework from our math teacher on the first day! We had to write from one thousand to about five thousand I think? I’m not sure of the specifics but I vividly remember crying a lot while I was at it.

Looking back I realise it wasn’t necessarily because of the difficulty level, but the overwhelming emotions that come with adapting to new environments, trying out something new and gaining new experiences can be daunting and a lot of times stressful to adapt to. 

I’ve been listening to a podcast on Avatar the Last Airbender and I’m listening to the episode called ‘BitterWork’, It is the one where Aang and Zuko resume training but they have to learn something new this time. With Zuko it's how to play with lightning with Aang it's earth bending and something about their frustration just clicked; trying new things is hard!  Especially when you’re not immediately good at it, and I guess that’s why our day ones might end in tears, same with day twos or threes. You’ve got to accept that you’d be shit and enjoy being shitty at stuff while enjoying getting overwhelmed with tasks meant to stretch you. 

In this episode, the ever-so-wise Uncle Iroh points out that “Pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source. True humility is the only antidote to shame.”

There’s some bar we like to hold ourselves to in the beginner phase that does not exist at that time and we feel ashamed of ourselves for not reaching that so-called standard. Like why do I feel bad that I can’t outdo Da Vinci after watching one YouTube tutorial video? It makes zero sense but here I am constantly catching myself slipping into said thought pattern.

I imagine the happiest people in the world are the ones who are genuinely happy with the ‘starting’ phase. Imagine being happy and content with yourself when you’re literally at your least skilled phase on the learning curve, being humble enough to honestly say ‘I do not know, I do not understand’ with zero shame and honest curiosity. Omo, if that’s not self-love pro max I don’t know what is.

With how my life’s been going, moving from state to state to study, growing from one class to another, it feels like change happens the minute you feel like you’ve settled into some form of routine or when you’re starting to get the hang of things. It's annoying not gonna lie, but it’s probably a good way of stretching my character to accommodate the person I want to become. 

As much as I complain about adulting, the bills, the pressure to become a certain thing to get accomplished so and so, I’m quite content with it. I look at my younger ones of varying ages and realise that most of what they see as ‘annoying or daunting’ is my ‘been there done that, it's not a big deal’. An example would be something trivial like washing the dishes or going on errands, its something seems like a big deal to preteen me, I’d start drama with  ‘It’s not my turn, I’m too tired, I did it yesterday’ and what not, but I’m older now and I’ve grown into doing what needs to be done regardless, it's just a couple of plates after all. 

Things like this make me excited for myself at older ages, I may be struggling with adapting to a situation right now but like all the evidence behind me, I won’t struggle forever, 22-year-old me might take a minute with it but the 27-year-old me would go  ‘eh it’s just a regular Tuesday’.

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Author’s Note:

As you can tell, I just love love Avatar The Last Airbender and you can listen to the podcast I was listening to here. I have also been thinking about love lately and I wrote a cute short piece about it on Iko Africa here.

Song of the Week

3D by Jungkook, cause why not right?