In the Wrong Element

A penguin standing on rock looks like a creature managing. Upright, a bit stiff, hopping from one place to the next with more determination than elegance. You’d never guess from watching it that this is one of the most capable swimmers alive.

Put the same bird in water and it becomes a different animal entirely. Fast, turning, completely at home. Nothing about the penguin changed. The element did.

I think about this more than I expected to, because so much of how I judge myself depends on where I happen to be standing when I do the judging.

There are rooms where I’m quick and rooms where I’m slow. Meetings where the ideas arrive and meetings where I hear myself saying obvious things in a flat voice. For years I read that as evidence about me. She’s good at this, she’s weak at that, fix the weak parts. It rarely occurred to me to ask what the room was made of.

Some elements are simply not yours. Large groups where the fastest speaker wins. Work that demands constant switching when you think in long stretches. Early mornings, if you’re not built for them. You can function in all of these, the way a penguin gets across rock. But functioning is not the same as flourishing, and mistaking one for the other is how people end up convinced they’re deficient.

None of this is permission to avoid everything difficult. We all have to cross rock. Admin exists. Difficult conversations exist. The point isn’t to arrange a life with no dry land in it; that isn’t available.

The point is to know where your water is, and to get back into it often enough that you remember what you’re actually like.

For me that’s writing early, walking without a destination, and a long conversation with one person rather than a short one with eight. Yours will be different, and it’s worth naming them plainly, because when things get busy those are the first things to go, and then you’re on rock for weeks wondering why you feel so ungainly.

Two questions I’ve found useful when I’m struggling. Is this hard because it’s genuinely hard, or because of where I’m doing it? And when did I last spend time in the element that suits me?

Sometimes the honest answer is that the work is the problem. But more often than I’d like to admit, I’ve been on the rocks for a long time, hopping steadily, drawing conclusions about myself that only ever applied to dry land.