Competence Is A Practice

Chapter 11

This post is a chapter of the book It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself: Creating and Maintaining Living Spaces That Make Your Life Better (In Spite Of Everything) by Hanne Blank Boyd.

Click here for the full table of contents.

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I’ve never met anyone who enjoyed feeling incompetent. I have, in fact, known more than a few people for whom the feeling of incompetence was so distressing that they strenuously avoided doing anything at all that seemed like it might cause them ever to feel that way.

There are perfectly logical reasons for this. Incompetence feels vulnerable: you don’t know something or don’t have experience with it, so you might be bad at it or get it wrong and other people might be critical. It also includes the unappealing possibility that you might screw something up and not even realize you did. The prospect of failure is a rough one to stomach. Ditto ineptitude. It’s harder still to maintain equanimity in the face of possibly getting dragged for it.

It feels a little something kinda like this. Image: https://www.today.com/parents/baby-suiting-its-thing-share-pics-your-mini-moguls-us-2d79469125

Not too surprising, then, that the “easier” or “simpler” the thing you feel incompetent at doing, the worse the feeling can be. We tend to assume that low-status tasks are not just menial, but also easy, with the upshot that we find it especially humiliating to contemplate being incompetent at something we think of as beneath us.

In my experience, the idea of being incompetent at housework takes a lot of people out at the knees.

But the truth is, incompetence does not in fact mean you’re a fuckup. It doesn’t mean you’re somehow in the wrong. All it means is that you don’t know what you’re doing yet.

The yet is crucial.

I won’t blow sunshine up your skirt: folks can sometimes be dicks when they’ve decided there’s something you ought to know already. Sometimes it’s even warranted. I mean, you don’t want to have your dentist watching a YouTube video about how to fill a tooth while you’re sitting there waiting for the novocaine to kick in.