I was not very talented as a child.

Outside of a decent handling of math and spelling, there were very few things I seemed to do well. My parents, God bless them, had relatively firm patience for my seemingly arrested development. It likely dawned on them early that I wasn’t going to be bringing home a Super Bowl ring one day.

As a result, they had me filter between various extracurriculars with relative fluidity; Soccer led to swim team, led to chess club, led to dance, led to wrestling, led to karate.

These were all the tried-and-true methods of arousing some level of social and physical activity from a given youth, and yet nothing seemed to stick. These hobbies were meant to elevate me, and over the years turn me from a raw child to a well-rounded young adult. Surely, given enough exposure, something should catch my mind and focus, I’d demonstrate an organic, near-prodigious aptitude for it, and I’d just naturally slip into the human role I was meant to play.

So why the hell wasn’t that happening?

What my parents couldn’t see beneath the surface of their misfit child was a near-immediate imposter syndrome that would form in the presence of any activity. Early in life I had seen so many around me, peer and elder alike, convinced that there was nothing more important in life than to be the capital-b Best at something, and those who were not the best were worthy of derision.

I was not, as you’d imagine, the best at many things.

I was a short child, relatively heavy-set, massively anxious, and totally socially inept. If you asked my grade-school teachers about me, you would probably arrive at the title of “Most Likely To Have Undiagnosed-Yet-High-Functioning Autism.” In a word, I was difficult. What might not be the most immediately apparent effect of being a difficult child is the aforementioned arrested development. While the other kids can’t wait to go to football practice and see all their friends, extracurriculars represented to me only further opportunities for ostracization. I’d arrive, they’d stare at me and cut jokes, and then we’d all go home. They’d laugh, I’d cry. As a result, I never got good at football. Repeat ad nauseum.

My world became highly insular. I spent countless hours of my young life on the floor of my bedroom, staring at the ceiling or playing with LEGOs, listening to any CD I could find around the house. These days of my life blur together, with entire years disappearing to the hazy ennui of a lonely child. Very little began to matter to me other than my own insularity.

The routine became comfortable: Come home. Lock door. Vanish into obscurity. Like clockwork, every single day. After a while, all that mattered was deciding what CD to listen to as I waited for the day to end and the next to come.

Then one day, the gray began to subside. Becoming more aware of the concept of “electronic music”, I had dabbled with music production software at a very simple level. I wasn’t good at it, but I was used to not being good at things. Shortly after, I became aware of an arts collective called Odd Future, an allegedly 60-person assortment of young artists with a knack for clever experimentation paired with immature iconoclasm. They were transgressive in every way a 12-year-old needs: irreverent, absurdist, unapologetic, and above all else they represented a magical three-letter acronym that would, in turn, inspire me to reinvent nearly every aspect of my life and self: DIY. Observing and studying their antics, their artistries, and their implied philosophies imparted upon me the lesson that the only way to make something happen was to make it happen yourself.

Tired of being a loser, I believed them. And then the funniest thing happened: I began to practice.

I figured that if these Californian asshole kids could pull it off, the only thing standing between my then-miserable life and a fulfilling one was myself. I had loved music my entire life, and through witnessing a crew of musicians who were defining their own sound and style, I knew I could find a place for myself in this Artform.

A keyboard I found jammed into a closet somewhere in the house quickly became my personal escape rope, as I began to teach myself the basics of playing music and working with music production software. Simple triad chords began containing suspensions, extensions, dominant sevenths and minor 9ths. Drum patterns became more complicated, compressors and EQs started to make sense to my eyes, and suddenly what used to look like the workspace of geniuses began to resemble a playground, begging to be toyed with. It stopped being a discipline and started being a joy.

Taking note of my decision to actually begin practicing something, my parents quickly helped me find a piano teacher. Although lessons only lasted a year, I was taught how to learn music, how to progress without getting off track. Most importantly, by the end of that year I did not feel so much like an imposter: I had applied, auditioned, and was accepted to to a public high school for music production — objective proof to my young mind that I wasn’t just OK at something, but I was achieving that perennially distant title of “Good Enough”.

For the first time in my life, a skill that I had honed over countless hours of practice had resulted in a real tangible change in my life: I would not attend high school with the general populace I so feared. Instead, I would be spending those years with others like me: misfits who carved out a home in the Arts.

It is of firm conviction that I believe that talent, skill, finesse – creative ability, is a muscle. We expect ourselves to be “naturally” good at certain things, yet can we expect our muscles to be “naturally” ready to face every challenge they face? Do muscles not begin as mere fat, unrefined and unstructured, until through repeated effort they are converted into muscle? Do they not atrophy with neglect?

In my first semester returning to College, I sat in a class of my peers as they answered to our professor that they did, in fact, believe that not everybody can partake in Art, that it takes a special mind and a natural aptitude.

My heart broke. They have never discovered how great they can be because they have never had the courage to be terrible.

We are too quick to forget: there was a time in the life of every talent and artisan in the world where they could only crawl and babble.

All else is practice, all else is training, all else is repetition.