the first day of my hand drafting class in my senior year of college, after the prof taught us how to frame up on the drafting table and went over how to use the tools we'd bought, he had us all take our pencils and make a mark on the top right corner of the vellum. then he walked us through the setup steps - the border, the title block, etc.
and he told us to erase the mark.
when someone - rosie, i think - asked what the mark was for he smiled.
"if you give a novice student an expensive, blank piece of paper, they panic. they think if i start using that i will ruin it. so the first thing i want all of you to do, any time you stare at a blank piece of paper, is to ruin it a little and take the pressure off yourself. pencil erases. anxiety has to be managed."
i hated that man for a myriad of reasons, but that was some of the best advice i've ever been given.
There have been some reblogs of this that assert it works with writing if you keysmash or outline or whatever, and here is the secret, my blueberries; it works with everything.
Afraid of a recipe? Fuck up your prep a little- mildly sloppy knife work is usually easy to fix and ignore. Now something has gone wrong. Nervous about a conversation? Make a purposeful mistake in the beginning that you can correct easily. Move on and keep going. Anxious about public speaking? Screw something up in an easy to ignore way. I like to mispronounce a word.
The trick here is that the call is coming from inside the house. Your brain is the only one who is demanding that you do things perfectly the first time. You can (and will) make a million little mistakes. None of them will be the end of the world. But if what you need is to control the situation, then control it. Ruin it on purpose and then erase the error.
