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Welcome to the second issue of Protagonist Magazine. Its nice to see you again!
The goal of these First Words sections is to define the concept of the “protagonist”, the subject at the center of this magazine.
At the most foundational level, we support the belief that everyone in the world has the ability to express personal agency, and through that personal agency affect change.
This issue explores the importance of personal practice, and why having a discipline outside of your “main thing” can be beneficial for staying sane, and staying sharp. Part of maintaining agency is staying prepared to take on any moment as they come. Sometimes its a chance to dive deeper into your current journey, other times a branch down a new path emerges. It’s important to stay ready, and know what you want.
Anyways, have you heard about the time a designer, a storyteller, a producer, a seamstress, and a pilates instructor walked into a bar…
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A sofa and a floor cushion serve the same purpose, but they ask different things of your body. One softens your edges, the other reminds you that you have a spine.
I try to live by that principle, injecting small forms of friction into my life as a sort of practice. Recently, some friends and I biked for a week through the mountains from point A to point B with little more than a tent, sleeping pads, and a more-than-occasional espresso.
A bike is the perfect instrument for reflection: a body-powered machine tracing the line between the natural and the artificial, showing how fragile yet capable we are when rubber meets the road. Effort, terrain, weather, fuel, and exhaustion all exist in this collaborative balance.
Pedaling for hours each day, I felt how friction builds not just memory, but empathy. It keeps me connected to effort, to craft, to the balance between comfort and challenge that seems to define “good” design.
The world needs objects that strengthen. “Good” design resists excess, it demands justification. Designers hold the privilege of deciding what “deserves to exist” in a world already at a carrying capacity for objects.
Injecting friction into how I live and work has become a way to stay attentive, to question, to feel, to notice. I’m still learning what that means. How ease and resistance might coexist in the things we make, and in the ways we move through the world. Maybe that curiosity itself is a small step toward making it better.
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Ever since I’ve become conscious of the things I’m constantly doing and coming back to, the frontal lobe magic, I’ve been slowly patching up the deformed patterns of my hobbies from childhood through my teenage years. When there were no apps or app stores in sight, there was Guitar Hero on my Nokia N97 for a few good years. I used to stimulate my brain with board games like Monopoly and Taboo, and later Uno, which became a major shift in our friend group. Ways to spend time was with more effort and intention while I was growing up.
Big shoutout to my parents, they encouraged me to play violin while I was secretly playing volleyball behind Maria’s (my violin teacher’s) back, because she’d be pissed if she knew those dainty piano fingers were smacking the ball left and right and used for crazy blocks. Being able to pursue something with high devotion was my fuel to keep going, to push the limits of my body further, as long as I enjoyed it. As I continued with both hobbies, I started to hate playing the violin, not because of the instrument itself, but because I was playing Nihâvend Longa with an upcoming PTSD. Each session built up like the Whiplash scene, Fletcher shouting, Andrew playing faster and faster, and the air thick with the feeling that something might burst any second.
Having to leave volleyball and violin behind to prepare for the university entrance exam is such a lovely process that takes everyone’s soul and spark and never gives them back. Speaking from experience, majoring in Interior Architecture didn’t help much either. I was never very good at making things with my hands, not a natural by any means, but I’ve always believed in “practicing and holding on even if I suck” because eventually I have to improve at some point. It’s a beautiful major to be in if you have a proper studio space, materials, and hope. My school didn’t have the first two, and I contributed as the third: a hopeless, non-crafty, can’t-do-intricate-things-with-hands type of girl. Pushing through blood, sweat, and tears in each project, I refused to practice model-making or try out materials and failed tremendously. Graduating a few years later, something in me still wondered, what if I did try again? I had isolated that urge to create for so long, after so many traumatic experiences during my studies, that I was scared to try. But this time, I was ready to bring out the playfulness, doing things my way, the way I wanted.
I started junk journaling, making collages, crazy scribbles, and sketches, vomiting out what I had been hiding for years, putting it all onto paper while documenting my creatively healing journey. I showed up every single morning to make things on paper, embracing the mess. I started to find my way of expression through creation. Practicing the art of making your own mess can be unexpectedly freeing. As overwhelming as it sounds, channeling energy into something handmade will always feel like magic to me.
All in all, I’m not new to this. I’m true to this pursuit of wonder.
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Saint Pressure is a creative identity I’ve explored for the last seven years. What started as a music production alias slowly morphed into a solo outlet, then into an amateur visual art practice that now manifests as drawings in my sketchbook and tattoos on my friends.
Long before that name existed, I discovered artistic expression as a deeply spiritual practice. I started writing music twenty one years ago in an unfinished room above the garage in my childhood home. I would make ambient guitar loops and cry. I would start bands and form lifelong friendships with my bandmates. I would create meaning out of a life I never asked for.
The act of continually making art has always been a vehicle to connect with myself, to place that discovery within the context of society, relationships, and what it means to exist. In many ways, I’ve lived a life of quietly making things just to stay alive. I once read, “expression is the opposite of depression.” That feels like the simplest and truest way to describe what my personal practice means: keeping my demons collared, releasing the root of fear, and building self belief.
Practically, I find power when I sit down with a pencil and a blank page during the first hours of the day when anything is still possible. I find escape during shifts at $hit jobs when my mind begs for purpose, and I jot down a lyric or hum a melody into my phone. I find peace in the middle of the night, when everyone else is sleeping and I’m making a dance track on my laptop with my headphones on. When nothing else is, that intimate space of creative ritual is always there for me, patiently waiting.
When I draw or tattoo, I tap into that same place, but without using my familiar music skill set. My hand moves, my brain rests, and I return to sound with sharper instincts. Having a personal discipline outside my main mode of expression keeps me fresh. It’s like cross training for the soul, each form of creation strengthening the other in ways I don’t fully understand, only experience.
Over the last few years I’ve learned that when inspiration hits, I need to finish the thought, to get a rough version of whatever I’m trying to say before the feeling fades. If I stop halfway, I lose the pulse. I work with a kind of rapid desperation when I’m tapped in, racing myself to capture the feeling before it settles upon another soul. It’s never about perfection, only preservation. As a result, my work gets done quicker and releases less polished.
My output comes in waves now, usually when life feels fxck’d. Last December, I took a two week trip to Berlin for a new perspective. While waiting for my flight, I thought, I suck at sleeping on planes, maybe I’ll make an album while I’m in the air. It had been years since I made music purely for myself. Four years prior, I’d been producing exclusively for other artists and for a new project with my partner. The idea of creating an album mid-flight felt like a necessary opportunity to seize, no one to interrupt me but the flight attendants, no one to stop me but myself. Fourteen hours later, I had a rough 30 minute LP. I finished it the following week in an ice cream shop that was closed for the winter. When it was done, I felt reborn. I’ll be releasing it in January.
Five months later, after obsessively listening to that record, I made a three song EP in a weekend during the ICE protests in Downtown LA. It was another response to feeling fxck’d, but this time, I created from a place of self belief rather than desperation. That’s what I wanted to share for this issue of Protagonist Magazine.
You can listen to a rough mix/master of it here: [LINK]
The release of these two musical projects was deeply reviving. They’ll be paired with physical zines of 90s inspired tribal tattoo designs I spent the last year drawing over morning coffee. The union of a lifelong craft with a new, novice expression captures what it’s all about for me: exploring, discovering, and keeping a pulse on the internal wonder that lives in all of us.
That secret soul place of creative expression is always there, always jealous, always waiting. To that, let us offer praise, lifestar
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Intro
This conversation took place over google meet on Monday, October 13th, between Maëlle (LE), missmayhem (MM), and networkp (NP). Maëlle is a pilates instructor based in Montreal, Canada, and missmayhem is a grad student at the Columbia University School of Social Work in New York. The original 64-minute recording has been edited for clarity and readability.
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LE: Okay, cool.
NP: And here we are.
LE: Here we are, ladies and gentlemen.
NP: Okay, so we were just about to talk about the theme of this issue, which is basically exploring personal practice and sort of like why it's important in today's age and throughout history – but like especially like right now where I feel like there's so many people I know around me, myself included, who without an ability to carve out some creative space outside of the main thing that they do, can feel so stifled or boxed in on the day-to-day. I'm fortunate to have a job that itself is really creative, but for the most part people are oftentimes doing something that's not really fulfilling, whether that's like energetically fulfilling, emotionally, whatever. And so my thoughts generally are that a personal practice of some sort helps you one, stay sane and stay happy, but then two, depending on what it is and depending on how seriously you want to take it, kind of gives you an opportunity to sort of like almost cosplay or like pretend or test out different versions of what your life could be like. Again, it's not like you need to have a personal practice that's like, "Oh, I want to definitely turn this into a whole other thing I could be doing for like my like a economic subsistence,” but there's something about being able to just like in a low pressure way explore that that I think helps you kind of feel a little bit depressurized from your main thing. And so, yeah, I think that just to me feels really on theme for how to survive in 2025, which I feel like is one of kind of the themes of the whole magazine.
MM: Totally. I have two ideas that I've just been thinking a little bit about since you asked me to get on this call. I think the first thing was like personal practice. I've been thinking about the distinction between personal practice and hobby. There's something about personal practice that feels more serious. And I think a lot of people have personal practices that they mislabel or kind of water down and like call it a hobby. Like for me, I didn't really think a lot about my personal practice, which right now I guess I would say is sewing. But then the more I thought about it, I feel like I've always had a personal practice and that's always been art related; and it's always been very tactile, and it's been to keep me sane. It has always been my kind of stress release. I think I labeled it as like creativity and I like art, but I think there was something about my personal practice being art that felt more of like a personal identifier because it was like just a stress reliever from anything else that was going on in my life.
NP: Do you have any thoughts about like, kind of grappling or thinking about what personal practice means? Is personal practice even the right word? I think it's cool that you mentioned the kind of “stay sane” aspect of personal practice. As I was writing this little intro I just sent out to people before this, I thought personal practice was so interesting specifically because of the kind of outlet it becomes for letting you try these other types of your life you could be living. But I realized almost equally, maybe even more importantly, it is literally just like the ease and like pressure release. So yeah, do you have any thoughts on how you define it yourself or does it just not even matter?
MM: I think I started to factor it in consciously more in college. I took art classes each semester again as kind of that sanity piece – like I need to do some kind of ritualistic creative outlet in order for me to be able to sustain my other classes and life. And so I made a conscious choice and effort to take at least one to two art classes each semester. Kind of just like tying back to what you were talking about in your intro about adulthood and carving out that space. I think yeah, probably in the last eight years I've thought about it more. I think as a kid it was just integrated with like school and friends and activities more where it wasn't something that I had to make that conscious distinction or effort.
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LE: I actually feel very similar and very different at the same time about the whole concept of self of personal practice. I have so many classes and random privates and like places I have to run around to. So everything is labeled so much in my Google calendar. And so I'll put my workouts in there to also remember what I do earlier in the week and everything. And one of them is just labeled self-practice and that's just like Pilates. It's just because I take private lessons and sometimes I'll take group classes – but self-practice is just when I practice by myself at home. And when I got the invite, I thought that's what it was, which is really funny. And you also labeled it the same color that I label my workouts. So I saw personal practice and I was like, "No, why do I have a workout that time? I have a call at that time." I was like, "No, that is the call." Which is so funny because there was nothing else to it. It was just written personal practice. It also made me think about the way that I label it. I feel like there's also an idea of personal practice and self-practice being like I'm practicing being myself or I'm like practicing being a person. And that's kind of how I feel with my different hobbies and different things that I do outside of work. I feel like across the board, whether it's work or whether it's anything else that I do, ultimately I feel like it's all ways and opportunities and a platform for me to practice being a person and to practice being the person that I want to be. And in that way, I feel that I don't really make that distinction between work and play and study. It is all kind of just whatever I'm currently working on. I feel that I've had a cycle in the past two and a half years where I'm having realizations – like you know the meme of like “guys will smoke weed to have the realizations a girl will have at 11 years old”? I feel like I'm getting so many feelings of like, "Oh my god, this is like such a big insight." And then it's like the corniest s*** ever that like a mom would put on a saying on the wall. Lately the one I've been thinking about is like “don't think negative thoughts.” I think it's so funny cuz it's so f****** stupid. And it's so true. There's just so many pieces of advice and self-help and so many things. And it's really just like you don't have to entertain negative thoughts. And that's kind of how I've been thinking about things. It's just been kind of coming up over and over in so many different things. And I feel like I kind of get cycles of realization. And then I see the patterns everywhere and I get to work through those patterns, and then it gets integrated, and then I forget that it was even a thing and then I kind of move on to the next thing. I feel like all my practices are kind of a way for me to do that and a way for me to try to do things and try to be a person in the world that makes things and that sees things and that interacts with people and that interacts with myself. And then all my practices are kind of mirrors. I feel like it's just kind of like I'm digging something and I don't really know what's in the ground and then I just kind of hit things and I'm like, "Oh, whoa. I didn't know that was there."
Recently I was on vacation and I came back and I was like, "Oh, I feel like I kind of miss my routine." And then Joey was like, "Oh, well, do you miss work?" And I was like, "Well, maybe not work, but just the routine." And then I was teaching yesterday and I was like, "No, I really missed work. I love teaching so much. It's so much fun and it makes me really feel my element and I feel very useful and I really like that." But my job ultimately is about making decisions all the time. So, it's like reading the situation and adapting and reading the situation and adapting and kind of like having an intention and just constantly modifying it. It feels like I just come in, and it's just a blank space and it's just me and the people that are in the class and I ultimately have 15 minutes to do whatever I want. And it is interactive because I make it interactive, but in a way it's still kind of just me just talking for 50 minutes and guiding people through things. I find it like I'm kind of like, “hey, get in my car,” not like, “you know, let's walk together" type of thing. I find that that's made me mature really fast because I started teaching when I was 19 and I would get in these rooms of people that were literally my parents' age and I was like “cool, now I have to tell you what to do” and like seem confident enough that you won't question me. I also have to be really aware of how I'm coming into the room and what energy I have. And I feel like that's held a very big mirror to what type of person I am. I feel like that has helped me notice so many things about myself just organically without sitting down and just trying to be like, let me figure out what's wrong with me. Someone was saying that like Carl – I think it was Carl Jung, question mark? – was saying that people really get caught at the insight level where they think that one day they’ll get this big aha moment and they will understand how to change their life for the best and finally they will be happy and they'll make the changes that they have been waiting to make. But ultimately, like he was saying, insight is one thing but the three things that you need to change your life for the better are also courage and endurance. So do the thing that you know that you need to do and then keep doing it even when it feels like it's not working until you get what you want. I feel like the elements of self-practice or personal practice get you really good at taking action. And I feel like that's just a really useful skill across the board. It's almost just like personal practice is about action and repetition, which I think are like the two things that you need to literally do anything. I think that action, like intentional action and repetition, will literally tell you everything you need to know about yourself and help you get anything that you want.
I find that some people are just not good at starting things. And some people are not good at continuing to do things. And some people are not very good at both. And that's not a judgment on their character. I think it's ultimately a skill. And I was someone that was really really good at starting things and really really bad at finishing. Not even finishing, but continuing things and like pushing through. And I think that what that showed me is that I really don't like the feeling of being bad at something. Once I realized that, I was like, cool, uh, what do I do about that? And then I was like, f***, I guess I just have to sit with the feeling of being bad at something. And to me, the thing that I find so empowering and so exciting about personal practice is the repetition aspect of it because I can be like, I'm doing this workout every day. And so if the workout today f****** sucks, it's kind of chill because I'll get to do it again tomorrow. And that took a lot of pressure off of the feeling of like, oh my god, I need to nail this. And I think that relief has applied across a lot of other things. My biggest personal practice is ultimately my Pilates practice. It has kind of fed into work and it's kind of its own thing outside of work. It makes me better at my job. It makes me like my job. It makes me not burn out. And I'm glad that my job has forced me to keep going at it at the times that I didn't want to keep going at it because I find that the fact that I'm so dedicated to something and I can do it rain or shine has made me way more resilient to stress and way kinder to myself and way more aware of the ways in which I can be very not kind to myself. Um and yeah, period.
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NP: Umm, that was like the world's best painting on personal practice thats ever been recorded. There were a few things I thought were really interesting, the first is how you rephrased “personal practice” to “person practice”, that was funny. Especially as you were framing it like reducing or sort of like eliminating the artificial lines between work, play, whatever. Like you can kind of just think of everything you do as practice and how to be better at this or be better at that and maybe better isn’t even necessarily the word always -- like maybe sometimes its actually just a consistency thing.
And the other point because it came up in last week’s interview were your thoughts about taking action. There's something that I think manifests at the action level that is different than the like, “I'm just kind of stewing on this concept.” It's like what are you doing? Did you leave your house today? You know, like what action did you take? I think there's something that feels more charged, energetically, about actions and like the role of actually doing a thing sort of elevates it. Like repetition feels like the only way I can actually learn something new these days. It almost feels like what I get out of new experiences these days feels less than what I get out of doing the same random arbitrary thing like a million times over time and seeing how I react or respond to that same type of situation. I found recently that doing the same thing day in and day out actually creates new perspectives, new experiences, and I don't know where that's from cuz it feels sort of counterintuitive.
LE: Yeah, I agree with that.
MM: I don't think they're contradicting each other. It's funny – when you say the word personal practice I immediately think about art just because personally my practice has often been art related. But practicing anything requires a consistency, an intentionality, a sustained effort or investment into whatever your personal expression of that thing is. I feel like just hearing you kind of talk about your own personal practices opened up the definition for me a bit more. I think there are themes to it. Like I don't want to say that there's a rigid definition. I think it really is dependent on the individual, but there is a certain – I think the practice element is actually like really really crucial to whatever that is.
LE: Mhm. Yeah. This is really interesting to me also because like so much of my job is also understanding how people learn. The biggest thing to learn as a teacher who's trying to explain something to someone and also as someone who's trying to understand something is like how do I teach someone? The easier things to teach and the easier things to learn will be the same – but the question is how do I understand what you don't understand? How do you understand what you don't understand? And I find that that's the thing that's the hardest because the teachers to me that I find are not as good are the teachers that will keep telling you to do the thing the same way or they think you're they're telling you different ways, but you're like, I don't understand what you want me to do and I don't know how to ask you how to tell me.
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LE: People get so much information of like oh you should do cardio, no you should do strength training, no you should do this like really specific routine, no you need to do this and then they don't do any of it at all because they get stuck in like the decision making aspect of it or they'll start doing something and when it doesn't work, they'll hop on to the next thing and all of that. But ultimately the general saying in fitness is just the right workout routine is the one you're going to do. And I find that that is like so helpful also generally across the board of like there's no right way to do anything. Like you can get results through pretty much any method as long as you do it. And that's why I find that action is so empowering and that's why repetition also is really empowering – because if you just are consistent then you will probably get there. In terms of learning, if I want to make my client understand what they don't understand, I need them to get a lot of input. like I need for them to do it every single way, the wrong and the right way and the way in the middle until they can kind of have enough information to be able to differentiate. And I find that like you can only progress and you can only make intelligent choices if you have nuance. And in terms of fitness, it's like nuance from your sensations. And I guess it could kind of be the same thing about other things, but you can only have nuance if you have differentiated experiences. And you can only have differentiated experiences by doing the same thing a thousand f****** million times. So if you do a workout once, you're not going to get better at doing the workout by just doing it twice because you haven't done it enough ways to be like, "Oh, well, when I do it this way, it feels this way versus when I do it this way, it feels this way." and then you can kind of make decisions. There's this practice called Feldon Christ. Essentially the general principle of it is you do a very very simple movement and you don't really get guided. You're just supposed to do it in a way where you're very aware, very focused, but you try to notice how you're standing in your own way and you allow yourself to do it the wrong way. And by doing it so many ways and doing the right way and the wrong way, all that, you get so much information and then it feels like it's kind of like a path.
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LE: And so then you can make decisions because you kind of know all the different ways that you can do things. And it feels like you notice so much about yourself, and then by noticing so much about yourself, you have so many more opportunities to make decisions. Personally, I feel like that is so empowering. Just to know what your options are. I think that we think that more information is helpful, but actually having the amount of information to me is irrelevant. It’s applying the information into action and getting input and feedback and experiences back from that that’s important – because the information itself is static and won't actually be that helpful in getting you anywhere. You just need to try to apply it.
NP: I was just thinking there was some anecdote you said about practice where it was making me think back to like this classic phrase in T-ball – like youth baseball coaches being like practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect. And I don't care about the whole thing like perfect practice doesn't make perfect. But I think it's true that practice doesn't actually make perfect. What practice does is it helps you notice and learn things. The whole thing we were just talking about is how the only use of learning new information is if you're ever going to action it at some point, and so I think there's an interesting thread that's come up which is: how do you also develop if you don't have it ever or how do you maintain this almost like feeling of courageousness? I think there is like a rut you can fall into with practice which is this kind of unenergized practice which is like I'm sort of through the motions. I'm like kind of open to learning new things but not really. And like if I learn a new thing I'm almost going to ignore that it happened because I don't really want to have to actually learn and apply it. And so I'm wondering if y'all have any thoughts on the role of courage or bravery as it relates to personal practice.
MM: Yeah. Yeah, I mean growing pains. I think practice is uncomfortable. I think sustained repetition isn't easy. Maybe it's just the way that I think about things, but like, for me, there doesn't need to be a goal. I feel like a lot of the time through the process or repetition, you're learning and discovering personal aspects about your emotional regulation. I attempted this, I guess I'll say, small personal practice of drawing a sketch every single day for a month. Like a white piece of paper with a pen, nothing else. I didn't have a hundred different colors to work with. I didn't have any other materials. And depending on the context of the day, there was something new that I learned. And like through that I learned that I enjoy parameters. Like for me parameters give me creativity. Give me something to work with. When I have just like a blank page, I feel overwhelmed and I don't know what to do with that. I didn't dive in and like psychoanalyze myself, but I feel like I guess just kind of going back to the the repetition of something and sticking with something, I think it can fall into something that I'm doing consistently because I want to get better at it, but you're not really in that like explorative phase and that uncomfortable phase.
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MM: I think for me the discomfort is actually really key to personal practice. I think there's some mediums and expressions and practices I have where I'm more comfortable with that discomfort or just through the years of that specific practice I have learned how to navigate those discomforts. Whereas like – I went through this whole impostor syndrome just like with Instagram and kind of trying to like grow your brand – but the comparison game I feel like really threw me out of my personal practice with sewing for a bit. I was so focused on the output and the optics of what I was doing and that really kind of derailed me from being bad at something and not having it feel like you're falling upwards.
NP: And that's kind of like the courage and bravery thing – that at the end there, which is like how do you do it even when you're not even there at all? And I think something you mentioned about the parameters was really interesting because it even goes back to where we started the convo which is like that question: why even have a personal practice or what even is a personal practice? I think that a lot of people are like the idea of picking anything to have, like a personal practice about allows you to learn everything about yourself. I think a lot of people shy away from choosing something because they want to keep their kind of canvas like infinitely blank, as you're saying, because they're like “oh if I pick something then what if I don't like it” and stuff like that but the crazy thing is if you don't pick a thing to start, you will never learn anything and then you will never actually be able to figure out the things that you do like, or it becomes so much harder. And so there's something to be said about having personal practice and why it’s important. It doesn't even matter what it is. Like it could be anything. As long as it's not super acutely detrimental to your health or like other things. Like without it, it almost feels like you might be completely blowing with the wind in this state of almost stagnation. And then I think the interesting thing is that personal practice doesn't necessarily need to be one of these things that's kind of generally conceived as like art or sport or something, you know? It can be like my personal practice of going to bed or like my personal practice of reading a book or my personal practice of actually listening when someone's talking to me. When you think about it like that, you learn things. I yeah I feel like it's kind of what I was trying to say at the beginning. I think people have a lot of personal practices and I agree that they're really important for personal development and just like connection with yourself and the world. But I think they're mislabeled. Like I think there is this pressure on personal practice to be this bigger thing. But the more that the definition expands in my head, the more that I'm like, "Oh, there's a lot of things." Being at this age, I feel like oftentimes you are like, "What am I doing?" And I do feel a little bit just like getting blown with the wind. But I think I am a lot more conscious of what I am doing and really try to hold on to the aspects of my life that could be personal practice.
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LE: You had said something like how do you keep going when it feels like you're just constantly failing at like step 0.5
NP: Yeah, I was just saying like you can't even notice because you're falling over the whole time or something like
LE: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I feel like it's not even about like it's okay to fail when you're doing something new. It's like if anything, you kind of want to fail. I feel that failure is actually really really really helpful. And the thing that's exciting to me is the idea of failing differently and giving yourself different experiences by just being really really stubborn about failing differently and then you will accidentally really f****** land it. Like if you fail the same way all the time then you're not being curious enough. But I feel like if you kind of constantly fail differently, then you're learning something. And I feel like I really think the opposite vibe of self-practice on the spectrum is self-help books. I hate self-help books because I used to love them and now they give me a f****** allergic reaction. Which is actually kind of funny because I'm kind of in that general realm of work. But I'm like, here's information. Do with that what you will. I hate people that are just like, I know you feel insecure about this. Here's a 10-step program to get rid of that thing you're insecure about. But at some point I was like, well, those people had to learn a certain way. Like they didn't take a f****** ecourse. Like they just tried and f***** up and figured it out and now they're selling that to me. I can do that as well, which I think is fine in certain situations where I don't have the time to trial and error until I figure out how to f****** make sourdough from scratch. Like, I'll just go and read the recipe. But I think there's so many things where we like to wait for someone to tell us how to do it, where the process is actually so helpful and you can just figure it out yourself. And the only way to do that is not reading more books, not taking more courses, not watching another YouTube video. It's kind of just trying until I figure it out by putting it into practice.
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MM: Putting it in practice.
LE: Exactly. And I feel like for me it was also just like a general idea of like I don't know. It's so funny and it feels so silly, but ultimately it feels very freeing to be like don't wait for someone to tell you the perfect way to do something. Like the first person who did a handstand probably landed it accidentally. Even a broken clock is right twice a day is like my moto. It's like if you try enough times, you'll probably figure it out. So, I think you have to be stupidly stubborn and just really invested in giving yourself different experiences because I think that ultimately if you're too much of a perfectionist then you're robbing yourself of so many different experiences and nuances and sensations that you could have that would just be tools in your toolbox. And I think that if you kind of see it that way, then it's way less of a burden to be failing. And that's it. I think that ultimately everyone has something that they could dedicate themselves to in some way or another. I feel like humans are naturally curious. But I think that it's just so many layers of feeling held back because you feel scared of failing when it's the only way. It's not even that it's like it's okay to fail. It's like you have to. You should put yourself in a position to fail. You should seek those experiences. It's just not doing the thing that you thought you were supposed to be doing in the way that you thought you're supposed to be doing it. But it's also like if you're not achieving the thing, maybe the way that you thought you were supposed to be doing the thing is wrong because clearly you're not getting it. So, like, how about you try a lot of different ways, including the ways that you think might be quote unquote wrong, and then maybe you'll find yourself a new place because clearly you want to be in a new place cuz whatever you're doing is not working, you know?
MM: It makes me think about failure and learning and like if you are considering it failing or learning if that makes sense. So like I had a list of different techniques that I wanted to attempt for the first time and I checked them off. And if I were to look at it in the moment I'd be like I failed, like this sucks you know, like this zip is trash, it's going to immediately split. And like I, you know, had a moment where I was like, I'm failing at it all. Like I'm not doing it. This sucks. Like I didn't evolve. I didn't grow. And Max and I had this conversation about like no, you learned. Like you actually learned so much in that process. And so I think it really is also about how you're framing your learning, you know, and how you're framing your failures. Like you tried it, you know, you learned that that didn't actually work. So there's probably a different approach. So it’s kind of like in knocking out those methods that don't work, you're getting closer to finding the ones that do. And so to your point, Mel, failing differently each time is really good.
NP: Yeah, the thing I was thinking is just like it feels like there's two themes that are: if you're trying to figure out how to achieve personal practice or like how to do it if you feel like you're someone who isn't already doing it. I think one is like trying to find environments, whether that's places, people, subjects where it's okay for you to fail. Hopefully it's in an environment where failing around the people who are there doesn't make you feel really bad about yourself. And then also like hopefully you're failing in a way where you're actually kind of learning, and so you're sort of embracing the failure. And then I think that if you can find those environments for yourself, if you couple that with the stubbornness we were just talking about, the stubbornness is kind of like – I think I feel like two things. It's like one, it's discipline, but then it's also almost kind of like what could maybe come off initially as an ignorant tunnel vision. But I think it is kind of a necessary thing, at least to apply a little bit maybe when first getting into things, especially in today's age of just being bombarded with information and videos and opinions. Like there's always going to be someone telling you you should be doing it differently and that's like more than ever.
00:58:19
NP: And so without a little bit of stubbornness to be like, "Hey, I know there's probably a better way, but I don't even care. I'm doing it like this, you know, like I'll figure it out over time. I know I might even literally know the way I'm currently doing the thing right now isn't even it but I need to do it for the sake of structured failure. Structured failure is like the guaranteed way to learn something instead of trying to take the shortcut by being like “oh but I just heard from like I could do this and like skip 50 levels,” you know? It's like, sure, maybe, but also probably not. And in doing so you're not even going to really learn anything.
MM: I would add curiosity to that. I feel like the stubborn aspect is like discipline. Like it's two-pronged. There's the discipline part and there's the inquisitive curiosity – like you're telling me it's this way but I'm curious about if I try it this way.
LE: Mhm. Yeah. Curious and disciplined at the same time is like a crazy combo. And also I feel like you have to accept the fact that you're going to come up against yourself a lot and you shouldn't be scared of that. It's not like “but what if I get discouraged?” You probably will, and that's kind of the goal. Like to be a person you kind of need to be able to do hard things, and I feel like personal practice is so much about being able to do hard things in a way that is easy, in a way that's like not straining – in a way that's like finding the ease in the hard thing. And so yes, you'll learn skills and you'll learn very tangible things, and like you were saying, like techniques and things like that, but it's also just ultimately learning how to learn, and learning how to do, and that will come in the process of learning said skill. You learn how to like not get stressed when something gets hard or you learn how to ask the right questions. You learn how to talk yourself through things. And all those things are so helpful and then they'll make it easier to do hard things the next time and it just gets easier and easier. But I feel like if you have all the scary parts about learning something new, if you are not scared of them coming up and if instead you embrace them as part of the process, then it becomes way less scary. And I feel like that applies to so many things. For example, if you have a boyfriend for the first time and you're like “oh my god what if we get into a big fight,” that is going to constantly weigh on you. If you're like 100% we will get into a big fight at some point and that's kind of part of it, that's just the way that it goes, then it's just so much less scary. I think that there's so many preconceived things about when you start something new and when you try to commit to something. Without being pessimistic, if you're like 100% this will happen or like probably it will and it's going to be fine and it's part of it, then that takes the scariness out of it .
NP: Yeah. And there's your pressure release and now you can be a normal person and try to survive.
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This issue would not have been possible without the amazing + generous support from the following people:
★ neesh chaudhary, cover design
★ angie rockey, assistant editor
★ rishi, contributor
★ defne, contributor
★ saintpressure, contributor
★ maëlle, subject of “Person Practice”
★ missmayhem, subject of "Person Practice"