I took a class this winter, in a subject I have no experience with. It was gloriously fun, but very challenging. It moved very quickly, and there were a lot of deadlines. My goal with this class was to develop a greater understanding and appreciation for the topic.
I produced a lot. I learned a lot. I am not now, and may never become, an expert, but it was a good experience.
I just had a final critique with the instructor.
It was brutal. She was not unkind, but she was not shy about letting me know many of the ways my project was lacking.
She was not wrong. It was a good critique (good critiques require quite a bit of skill). It was illuminating, and I have some better ideas — from an expert! — about how to approach this kind of project going forward.
But here’s the thing: critique can be hard. When you’ve invested a bunch of time and work in something, it’s hard to hear all the ways it doesn’t measure up. It hurts the ego; it can bruise the heart.
But it is important to be able hear it and accept it — or at least to listen to it, and decide what you want to take away from it.
I’m not sure I could have done anything better or different with this project, so even though some of it was difficult to hear, I am a beginner at this — I am not capable of greatness, at least not yet (and there were a few other life circumstances going on in the background, so even if I was capable of more, I might not have been able to bring it to the table) — and my goal for this class was to finish.
So I will let this experience sit for a minute, digest the advice I have been given, maybe do some drawing for fun and find an approach (slower, more methodical, more iterative) to this kind of work that makes more sense to my brain.
And then I will try again.
Carmen Yount 