Competence Under Construction
The embarrassment we avoid isn't incompetence revealed—it's competence under construction. We become ourselves through others' witness to our stumbling, not our success.
The protection of competence prevents competence. We construct elaborate theatres to shield an image that doesn't yet exist, not realising this very shielding prevents its creation. Growth lives exclusively in the territory we flee—between who we are and who we're becoming.
The choice presents itself constantly: perform what you already know or transform into what you might become. Most choose performance, perfecting in private until worthy of public display. But transformation requires the opposite—public fumbling, witnessed incompetence, the archaeology of discovering what we might become.
The violence we do to ourselves when we insist on being experts and refuse to be beginners. We suffer alone rather than ask for help, write novels that live forever in drawers, start businesses we never mention until they succeed. All protecting the same impossible thing—the illusion that we emerge fully formed rather than through the exact stumbling we're avoiding.