Lesson Learned, Whitney: Be Someone Else's Biggest Fan

Here's essay #8 by the lovely and brilliant Whitney Roberts Ehle.

As a teenager, I remember several older people at church who would ask me about all the details of my life: my favorite school subjects, crushes on boys, my life goals, etc. These mentors would also tell me that I could take my talents and interests and use them to reach my goals. Their confidence made feel confident that I would be a Broadway singer, a heart surgeon, a famous novelist. I invited my mentors to my high school plays, and they came. After I sang a solo in church, they always made sure to tell me how well I had sung. They encouraged me in my desire to live a Christ-like life by praising me for the good decisions I made. Above all, their interest in my life made me feel insanely fascinating and exciting. I felt good about myself and my abilities when I was with them.

When I left for college, I found myself living in an apartment with six other girls who were all amazingly talented, intelligent, and beautiful. I loved my roommates dearly, and we were really good friends. But I found myself feeling mediocre. My ability to sing or play the piano was no longer anything out of the ordinary. After all, every Mormon girl can sing and play the piano, right? For a long time, I tried to do anything that would bring me the praise and confidence boosts I missed receiving from my high school mentors.

One day when I was singing slightly louder in church, so that the person sitting next to me would compliment me, I realized how ridiculous I was being. Yes, I was being plain ridiculous! The girl sitting next to me had a beautiful voice, and she probably liked it when others told her. After the song was over, I told her that her voice was beautiful, and I learned that I didn’t need to begrudge others the compliments that were their due. Rather than diminish my self-worth by complimenting my neighbor, I had actually increased my confidence. No, I didn’t necessarily feel more capable of conquering the world with song, but I felt more confident in my ability to love.

Guest Post: The Cookie Killer

Melissa has submitted a post before and it was one of our more popular posts...so we are always happy to welcome her back. Melissa lives in Las Vegas with her husband and baby daughter and is a recent graduate of UNLV.

I have a confession. A dark, humiliating secret which I have, until now, been too ashamed to admit. Before I divulge the ugly truth I want to make it perfectly clear that I am an incredibly lovely person, and I have hope that I will not be judged based upon what I lack but rather on what I do not.

I cannot bake cookies.

Now this may seem at first glance a simple and trivial quirk but let me tell you--it is neither simple nor trivial. There is something about me that defies the science of baking even the simplest chocolate chip cookie. Has it always been this way? Perhaps… I don’t think I ever attempted outside my mother’s presence until I got married.

It started as a gesture of love for my new husband. I began mixing the ingredients one by one, following the directions explicitly. I dropped the dough by the teaspoon onto the cookie sheets and baked them according to the label. When the timer went off I went to retrieve the cookies with my husband following eagerly. I opened the oven--and to my horror, each cookie was a flat disk melted to the bottom of the pan. Amidst the laughter from my husband, I burst into tears. What could I have done wrong? I tried again with the same batch of dough. Same result. It would be months until my second attempt.

That time, I tried again following even more explicit directions. The result never varied. I thought, it must be my mother’s recipe! I tried a new recipe. Same result. I tried varying the ingredients, the temperature. I looked on blogs and other websites… same result. I tried seven different batches, different types of cookies, different instructions. Each time I plopped the cookies in the oven they became flat, inedible disks.

When we moved to our new home I felt hope. I had a new oven, I had a renewed commitment to conquering the cookies, and more than that (and here is the key) I was now a mother! Every mom can bake cookies, right? So armed with confidence and a jar of pre-mixed cookie ingredients from our neighbors, I began baking some cookies. Can you guess what happened next?

Clearly it was not meant to be. I am a cookie killer. Sadly, cookies are a comfort food of which my family will be deprived. It is silly, really. The tears no longer come, only a sigh of disappointment and a resolve never to try again (although for some reason I still have not given up).

So what does this have to do with the quest to become lovely? I think at some level we are all destroyers of something we wish we could master. Unfortunately, we do not all have the ability to do everything we want. There are people who would desperately love to contribute something to society that would be embraced as wonderful or beautiful. Some people would love to have a talent for singing, others would love to play the piano or create beautiful art, and others just want to make a dang batch of cookies for their family.

The key to being successful is to embrace the things that we are talented at, even if we don't think they're important. I may never be recognized for my ability to keep an organized, pristine home. There isn’t a category in a talent show for folding laundry, changing a diaper one-handed, or scrubbing toilets. As a teacher I wasn’t honored in any ceremonies or banquets, and as a wife and mother I’ve never been given a standing ovation. Now I can also accept that I will never be praised by a neighbor for a delicious batch of cookies. I’m okay with that. We need to celebrate the things we can do, and accept the things we cannot. I think the reason we were all given different talents and abilities is so that we can recognize our dependence on each other as a whole. Rather than being bitter for the things we cannot do, we need to be happy for the success of our friends, and share our skills and talents (no matter how trivial we perceive them to be) with others.

That being said… I would love some cookies.

Go For The Gold

#215--Pursue more than just the things you are good at.

You will be told at a young age what your talents are. Enjoy the compliments, but don’t accept them at face value. You don’t want to walk a narrow path; attempt things you aren’t comfortable with and uncover skills or proclivities you didn’t know you possessed.
(from Prudent Baby)

I think a lot of people see themselves as static, as something like a character in a movie: you have certain likes and dislikes, you are good at certain things, you aren't good at others. You have certain personality traits; you like certain kinds of music and watch certain TV shows; you don't like certain foods; all those kinds of things. That is how I often perceive myself, and I blame this partially on those little "about me" blurbs we're always having to write--writing about who you are in a short paragraph is very difficult, and so we write about what we like instead, and then start to think of those two things as the same. They aren't.

My aunt Angela was an opera singer until she was around 40 (I don't remember her exact age). I remember going to her concerts when I was younger, thinking she was amazing. But she never progressed to where she wanted to be. Short story short: one day she went to a craft store, bought a block of clay, and in six hours discovered that she has an amazing talent for sculpting. She's been doing it for several years now, and has truly found her calling. Her sculptures are incredible, and you would never know that this is something she never even tried until her 40s. (Thanksgiving Point, in Utah, is going to have a lot of her sculptures on display in a sculpture garden.)

So the moral of the story is, don't put yourself in a box. The fact that you haven't discovered a talent yet doesn't mean you don't have it; you were not fully formed when you graduated from high school. Don't be afraid to try new things, even if you have no reason to think you'll succeed at them. Life is for experiencing things. Don't limit yourself to staying the same person you've always been; give yourself room to grow, to develop new talents and hobbies, to change old habits and become who you want to be.