Skill Regression Rambles: Thanks Joel

I have friends. Many talented friends who are great people. I enjoy them. 10/10 would recommend to your mother.

One of my buddies is Joel, from The Cutting Mat Podcast. It’s a quality podcast. I listen to it often. Joel also has a cool hobby blog at Yenshin! studios. I come back to his recent post, “Skill Regression in Scale Modeling.”

(Tony Hawk, if you’re reading this, please reach out. They’d love to have you on the show.)

Repeating in my brain enough to drive me up a wall. Not so much the Scale modeling aspect. I’ve never really dabbled in traditional skills enough. If my scribing sucks, it’s because I barely scribe.

I have been struggling with skill regression enough to make me incredibly self-conscious about my current writing. Gifted youth to adult burnout, if you must.

A level of dread when it comes to sitting down at my laptop, staring at this screen. Waiting for words to appear that never do. Forcing them never feels right. It just leaves me with a sense of dread in my stomach. Even worse, the green touch of jealousy when I see pieces I want to write. I hate feeling jealous. Leaves me guilty and ashamed.

What happened to my skills from university? I’ve only been out for a little over two years. One day, it felt like I was hitting home runs to “wait, do I put a comma there?” Did my papers suck, and the professors just didn’t have the heart to tell me?

(With the money I spent, I sure as hell hoped not!)

Now it feels like I gave a bonobo a pen, a pad of paper, a pat on the back, and went to take a nap.

This is normal. Old professors have reassured me so. It’s a skill that I don’t get to do as often now that I work full-time and have more on my plate, like student loans. Still hurts, but it doesn’t make me any less of a writer. Words will still be had.

That’s all I, or anyone, can do. Write. Paint. Draw. Rinse and repeat until 2026 is done. Then we do it again in 2027. So I wake up. Do my free writing where I needlessly throw words down. Which has been helpful. I share them with my friends and Discord pals.

It becomes enjoyable again. Might take a bit. We’ll get there.