It's ok to suck

I have just received an audio recording from the last open mic I performed at.

Boy do I suck.

This was the first time I heard myself perform stand-up comedy. It's the first bit of public speaking I hear myself do in about a decade. I was a theatre actor for a strong minute in the early 2000's. I saw a few video recordings of that. I was sometimes good, mostly just ok, sometimes annoying to look at. So I was prepared for this recording to not be the best bit of stand-up comedy I've ever heard.

But boy do I suck.

The thing is though: I need to get over myself. In a lot of ways. But first and foremost in accepting that I suck. And sucking is good. Because I know that I'll be learning from that suckage. (Suction?) And I know that next time I'm on stage, I'll suck just a tiny bit less.

I didn't always look at things this way. I was raised to believe that I was very special and talented. I'm an only child, and my mom has called me a genius for as long as I remember. My IQ was tested in primary school and high school, and I always scored really well. I did very well in primary school, and by the time I got to high school my sense of entitlement was so inflated that I didn't even bother to take the effort to study anymore. I did well enough to pass without any effort in the beginning. And I hated that school so much that I wasn't going to indulge them with actual study. I was sent to a strict catholic school that focused on dead languages and mathematics. I wanted to be an artist. (Of course I did. I was very special.)

My pleas to transfer to another school fell upon deaf ears with my father no matter how bad I did.  It wasn't until my dad passed away, when I was 23, that I gathered up the courage to go to an artistic school. I did my entrance exam at a somewhat renowned theatre school here in Antwerp. Successfully. Very successfully, in fact. The six minute monologue that I did at the end of the week-long entrance exam was so good, that even the fact that I hardly ever did anything good throughout the four years of theatre school didn't persuade my teachers to flunk me.

So there I was, all graduated from theatre school. Ready to be unleashed upon the world.

The world, however, didn't give a fuck.

I was devastated. To this day I catch myself telling people how I mostly regret that no one ever found a good use for me in the Belgian theatre or television world. This, I have come to discover, is exactly what entitlement sounds like.

It's up to me to find a good use for me. No one else will. That still sounds kind of sad to me. But it's just true. And on a good day, I realise how that statement is in fact a very positive one. And that hidden in it is a world of opportunities for me.

All I'll have to do is work.

And suck at what I'm doing. Until I get good.

Here's Ira Glass explaining it better than I just did:


Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.