learning to be an amateur
In ninth grade, I learned about etymologies and became obsessed with the origins of words. One I kept returning to was amare, to love, which eventually evolved into the word amateur, or the pursuit of something for the love of it. Somewhere along the way, I forgot that.
Actually, I think we all did, because, in the modern world, being an amateur became less about love and more about incompetency. We build entire systems, schools and workplaces, around making sure no one ever looked like one.
I am very good at overthinking my ideas to death. In 2020, I jotted start a blog on my tattered journal as a major goal of the year. I knew what I wanted so badly since then, to carve a space on the internet for myself. Verbatim, I’ve written: I’ll talk about my growth in a way that inspires others / help them solve a problem / provide insight so they know they’re not alone. I never started. I didn’t realize how forward I’ve pushed this idea until it reappeared into my 2021 goals. It was only in 2024 that I started Bear.
How much time have I wasted betraying myself? Reading my journal entries, I circled this question, wondering what I was so carefully avoiding. I thought it was a lack of original, profound ideas to write about (not true, there is room even for the mundane, especially for the mundane) or my flawed conviction that I must perfect my skills before I earned the right to blog.
Neither was true. I was simply too embarrassed to start from nothing. I was afraid of being perceived an amateur. I also never experienced any relief in my delay but a persistent, pang-like guilt that continued to bother me for four years. Why did I keep thinking about it, if I was so embarrassed to start?
There is a strange intimacy in being an amateur, I think. To love something so deeply and publicly be bad at it is an act of devotion. The amateur shows up without armor, metrics, and the guarantee of impressiveness; and, in doing so, preserves something so profoundly human that professionalism often erodes. In a culture obsessed with optimization and visible competence, the amateur’s devotion is radical in its simplicity. The opposite of amateurism is not professionalism, I think. It is indifference.