Things Fall Apart
It's a good thing. I promise.
The spousal unit takes tennis lessons. He used to play ages ago and missed it, so a year ago he found group tennis lessons nearby. He is working to build consistency in his forehand (his goal) and make tennis friends1 (my goal for him).
Two weeks ago, he was the only student in his class and got a one-on-one lesson where he and the coach worked only on his forehand. Bad habits were teased apart, breakthroughs were made, and he came home glowing (and not just in the sweaty sense).
Last week's class was an entirely different experience. His newfound skill had turned to ashes, taking most of his prior skill with it. Nothing worked. His forehand was terrible. His backhand was worse. The ball was going every which way but where he was trying to send it.
He came home still marinating in the frustration of his fall from grace, only to be greeted by my hearty congratulations.
Why am I—sincerely—congratulating him on the worst tennis he's played in decades?
Because I know enough about motor learning to recognize the process.
You start out at some level of skill. You practice, you learn, you steadily improve until you reach some level of competence.
You want to get to the next level, so you train hard, work with coaches, do everything right and you reach a breakthrough!
Then the ground falls out from under you. Your performance doesn't return to where it had been before; it's simply terrible.
If you keep the faith and keep at it, you’ll come out the other side of that chasm improved from your former baseline.
Perhaps ironically, sometimes it’s the little tweaks that cause the biggest crashes.
In my understanding2, we have something like canned programs that we run for a lot of things we do. They can be really flexible, which is good because something like a forehand in tennis is going to be different every time we run that program. These programs tend to have some set of features that are hard-coded and others that we can adjust based on specific circumstances.
The total crash, in this metaphor, is what happens when you are replacing one program with another. Maybe 99% of the hard-coded stuff is fine, but that 1% that needs updated means you basically have to load a whole new program with the new parameters. While that new program is loading, you, my friend, are bricked.
Based the variety of fields that have a metaphor for this processes, I suspect that this exercise in frustration is a generalized feature of basically any creative or growth project.
Yay.
“In the fog” is from my years in the data mines. You spend months or years designing an experiment, building up the equipment and code you need to run it, do promising pilots, and still end up with a data set that makes no sense based on your current understanding. Congratulations, you are “in the fog.” When you come out the other side, you will know something no one has ever known before, but as with driving in actual fog, expect to miss some turns, back up, make wrong ones, back up even more, and winch yourself out of some ditches along the way.
Jessica Abel, maker of award-winning graphic novels, describes this phase of the creative process as “the dark forest.” She uses this term to describe the point where everything is trying to come together, but just … isn't. Work you put in becomes completely removed from tangible product out. Everything feels confusing and overwhelming, and there is nothing for it but to keep going until you reach the other side.
The mildest form I've heard described is a piece's “awkward teenage years.” This application describes the process for smaller, self-contained works. A piece starts off so promising, and then, after much investment of time and effort, it reaches a point where you think it may well be ruined. Keep working, and it will get its act together (or not). Only time will tell.
My favorite metaphor for this process may be “in the goo.3” As with so many of my favorite metaphors, this one is organic (as opposed to mechanical). The goo in question refers to the process of metamorphosis that caterpillars go through to become moths or butterflies. The process for a squishy wormy thing to become a crunchy thing with legs and wings is not linear, to put it mildly. A caterpillar is a caterpillar, a butterfly is a butterfly, but the stage between is, quite literally, a sac of goo. Nearly everything that the caterpillar was must be broken down into its component parts before it can be reassembled into the machinery that will let a former worm touch the sky.
This last one is most apt for larger changes, personal growth, or shifts in one’s identity. It is exactly as unmooring as it sounds.
That some version of this total breakdown appears in every facet of growth tells me that it is not avoidable. This further suggests to me that one of our greatest limitations in both our work to create things and to grow as human beings is our tolerance for being in the goo, for traveling through the fog or dark forest, for practicing faith and forbearance during those awkward teenage years.
It's not comfortable, it's not fun, but it's also not optional.
May you find safe passage, and then more than you could dream of.
I don't play tennis beyond dinking a ball around occasionally and have no interest in “improving” myself in this regard. Ergo, Dude needs friends he can play with. We don't outgrow this particular need, ever.
I spent ~15 years working in neuromotor control research, but this exact branch was not my primary focus (and last I checked, the details on this were far from nailed down), so we’ll call this a moderately-informed opinion.
I’m pretty sure I stole this one from a conversation with Sam Hunter.