I’d allowed doubt to block me like a football fullback.
Spatial reasoning has always defeated me. After more than three decades living in the same city, I still have trouble telling east from west, north from south, mere miles from home. Our beltway has an inner loop and an outer loop. I can’t tell them apart.
When a box arrived containing a tiny little shelf system for our kitchen counter, my heart sank. My husband, my very own spatially gifted handyman, was out of town. I was eager to get these shelves assembled so that I could better organize the countertop.
FYI: my deficits in spatial reasoning are unrelated to my exquisite sensitivity to spatial order. I need objects to be neatly aligned when in sight, and properly stored when out of sight. Clutter and disorganized spaces render me physically and existentially uncomfortable.
So without my handyman around, I figured the tiny-shelf project would have to wait. That did not make me happy.
I stared at the box, wondering what this thing actually looked like.
I opened the box and took out the parts. My heart sank because it was an unassembled jumble of stuff with a page of instructions. I picked up one wire piece, then another, then a shelf, and then the little plastic packet containing doohickeys.
My first thought: This is beyond me. I’ll never figure this out. The instructions printed in tiny letters will confound me, so will the diagram, and I’ll get frustrated and feel stupid and helpless. Or else I’ll break it and then feel even more like an idiot.
A shame spiral triggered by my incompetence began to engulf me.
But I was also in some kind of mood. Maybe I was tired of assumed helplessness—of not even trying before I know for sure if I can do a thing.
I sat down on the floor and spread the pieces around. I read the instructions, twice, three times. I picked up the tiny screwdriver that came with the kit. (Even I know how to use a screwdriver.) I stared at the diagram, read the steps over and over.
Oh, for God’s sake, just put the fucking thing together. Stop making this a big deal. It really isn’t. This isn’t an IKEA table. It’s two little shelves attached to two wire brackets. End of story.
Here goes nothing.
Reader, I did it. I put the thing together. I didn’t make any mistakes. I interpreted the diagram and turned the shelves around properly: I didn’t confuse back and front, or left and right.
I set the shelves on the counter, where they fit exactly as intended and held the loose items that had been hanging around at random—salt and pepper shakers, most-used spices, and so forth.
And then I knew:
I’d allowed doubt to block me like a football fullback.
My doubt was strong; it presented as fact, telling me, you can’t do this.
But that inner voice of doubt was wrong, this time. Maybe it’s wrong most of the time. Maybe even all of the time.
Now I have to wonder, what else am I avoiding because I doubt that I can do it?
Hmm.
A note about this article’s title
Any excuse to work Stephen Sondheim into a story. His two-volume opus of annotated lyrics from all his shows spawned famous phrases: Finishing the hat and Look, I made a hat (from Sunday in the Park with George). As Playbill noted in its review of one of the volumes, this is about “the artistic act of making (creating) a hat “where there never was a hat.””
We can make all the hats our hearts desire, once we set aside our doubts and get to work.
My Julia has overcome a similar thing and now is the first to leap on an Ikea assembly item.
My Julia has overcome a similar thing and now is the first to leap on an Ikea assembly item.