You are allowed to be the weird one.
An invitation to turn up as who you actually are, on the grounds that the version of you that gets edited for the room can only ever attract people who liked the edit.
The mug
A particular thing happens in this building and I have now watched it happen hundreds of times.
Somebody walks in with an idea. You can see it on them. They have been thinking about it in the car and it is strange and specific and slightly too ambitious. Then they get to the table, glance around the room, run a very fast calculation, and make a mug.
Not because they wanted a mug. Because a mug is defensible.
That was a decision about the room, not about the pot.
And there is a version of the same move that happens in conversation, which I find harder to watch. Somebody starts telling you about the thing they genuinely love, and you can hear them turn the volume down on it in the middle of the sentence. Halfway through a real answer they switch to a safe one, and the safe one is nowhere near as interesting, and they know it.
Short version of this letter. Editing yourself for a room works, which is exactly why everybody does it. It also guarantees that the people who come toward you are matched to the edit rather than to you, and that bill arrives later, with interest.
If you are here looking for people, the whole thing turns on having the nerve to be specific in public.
Masking is not a flaw. It is a strategy that works, which is the problem.
It costs you in three places, all of them late. Everybody it attracts is matched to the edit rather than to you. There is never a clean moment to take it off, so you keep it on and pay a maintenance fee forever. And you end up lonely in company, which is a worse kind of alone than the ordinary kind because there is nobody to mention it to.
···Why we do it
I am not going to be glib about masking, because it is not stupid and it is not weakness. It is a strategy, and the strategy has genuinely excellent short-term numbers.
A smooth, agreeable, unobjectionable version of you gets approved of quickly. It creates no friction. Nobody in the history of rooms has ever been rejected for being pleasant and a bit vague. If your goal for the evening is to not be disliked, the mask is undefeated.
Masking is not a flaw. It is a strategy that works, which is the problem.
Because it works, you keep using it, and the cost never shows up on the night. It shows up about eight months later, in three separate places.
Everybody it attracts is matched to the edit. This is the one that matters. The people who came toward the smooth version like the smooth version, which means the friendship now requires you to keep producing it. You have hired yourself a permanent job.
You cannot take it off later. There is no clean moment to introduce the real one. The relationship was built on a set of assumptions and the real you contradicts several of them, so most people simply keep the mask on forever and call the resulting tiredness ordinary life.
You end up lonely in company. Nobody warns you about this one. Being surrounded by people who like a version of you is a specific kind of alone that is worse than actually being alone, because it is harder to name and there is nobody to complain to about it.
A room full of people who like the edit is a lonelier place than an empty room.
The arithmetic of turning yourself down
Here is what you are actually doing when you turn yourself down for a room. You are raising your hit rate and destroying your accuracy.
Walk into a busy room as the whole of yourself, weird interests and strong opinions and the enthusiasm you normally keep a lid on, and maybe three people light up. Several are neutral and a couple think you are a lot. Walk in as the smooth version and nearly all of them are perfectly fine with you.
Walk into a busy room as the whole of yourself and maybe three people light up. Walk in as the smooth version and nearly everybody is fine with you, which sounds better right up until you remember you did not come here to be found acceptable.
Nearly all of them sounds better right up until you remember what you came for. You did not come here to be found acceptable by a room. Nobody has ever driven home happy about that.
You are not trying to be liked by a room. You are trying to find three people.
Be yourself and your people can find you. Be somebody else and only the wrong ones can.
And the three are worth more than the whole polite remainder by a completely unreasonable margin, for one simple reason: they cost nothing to keep. There is no performance to maintain, no version to remember, no tiredness afterwards. You can be in a bad mood in front of them.
Every word of that is true of the pots as well, incidentally, which is the version of this argument I have already made at length. Make what you want rather than what the room would approve of.
The permission list
So here is what you are allowed to be in this building. Not tolerated. Allowed, encouraged, and in most cases actively wanted, because this list is the reason the place is any fun at all.
Make the same shape forty times. Nobody in here is bored of your bowls. Not one person. The only person keeping that tally is you.
Be obsessed with one glaze. Come and tell us about it at length. There is at least one member who could give a lecture on a single bucket and we would all turn up.
Make the ugly thing on purpose. Deliberately, with commitment, as a bit. Some of the best work that has ever left this building started as a joke that got out of hand.
Make nothing at all. Come in, wedge a lump, drink a coffee, talk to somebody, go home. That is a completely legitimate use of an evening and it is nobody’s business but yours.
Name your pots. Out loud. To other people. With a straight face.
Be the one who talks too much about their dog. You will find the bar for this is set impossibly high by the owner, who employs a thirty five pound dog and mentions him constantly.
Be quiet for three hours. Nobody in here reads silence as rudeness. They read it as trimming. You can sit at a busy table, say almost nothing, and be entirely welcome at it.
Or be loud. The room can take it. Rooms where nobody is loud are rooms where nothing happens.
Bring the notebook, the reference photos and the measurements. The person with the plan is not a nerd, they are the person who finishes things, and everybody else is quietly copying them by spring.
Or refuse to have a plan at all. Turn up with nothing in mind and let the clay decide. Both of those are real ways to work and neither one is the grown up version.
Wear the thing. The apron with the thing on it. The shirt about the very specific interest. Somebody in that room is about to become your friend because of it.
Like what you like out loud. The fandom, the music nobody else in the room listens to, the niche you normally introduce with an apology. Drop the apology. The apology is the only part that is doing you damage.
Make the thing that is only funny to you. It will not be only funny to you. It never is.
Ask the question you think is too basic. Four people at your table wanted to ask it and now do not have to, and every one of them will be grateful. There are a thousand potters and a thousand ways, so nobody in here gets to tell you that you are holding something wrong.
Say no to the class photo. Being unapologetically yourself includes the parts of you that decline things. Nobody will chase you about it.
Say you love it. About your own pot, out loud, with nothing attached. No apology, no listing of its faults, no pre-emptive explanation of the crack. This one is the hardest on the list and it changes the most.
None of that is a list of things we put up with.
My own skin in this
I should put my own skin on the table, since I am asking for yours.
I have spent my working life being publicly, tediously, sometimes inadvisably myself in writing. I have put things in front of very large numbers of people that a sensible person would have kept in a drawer. So I am not theorizing here.
And it cost me people. It genuinely did, and I am not going to pretend the trade is free, because you would smell it and stop trusting the rest of this. Some people got a clear look at the whole of me and quietly decided against it. A few of them were people I would have liked to keep.
Being fully yourself will cost you people. I am not going to pretend otherwise.
Here is what it bought, though, and I would not trade it back for anything on offer. Every single person still around me knows exactly what they signed up for. There is nobody in my life I have to perform for. Not one. I have no idea what the smoother version of this life would have looked like and I find I am not curious about it.
Nobody left in my life needs a performance from me. That is the whole return, and it is enormous.
And your version of this bet is far safer than mine was, because you are not putting yourself in front of a country. You are looking for about three or four people in one room, on a Tuesday, in Draper.
The challenge
So here is the challenge, and it is smaller than the letter has probably made it sound. I am not asking you to reinvent your personality at a pottery class.
Say the enthusiastic sentence at full volume. Whatever you were about to turn down two notches on the way out of your mouth. Let one out undimmed and watch who lights up, because somebody will.
Make the thing you actually pictured. Not the defensible version of it. The strange one. If it fails it fails, and a failed strange pot is better company than a successful safe one.
Answer the question truthfully. When somebody asks what you do, try answering with the obsession instead of the job. It is a completely different conversation and it is the one you actually want to be in.
Let one person see the weird one. Not the room. One person. That is the entire assignment and it is genuinely how this starts.
One unedited thing per class. That is the whole ask.
And if the willingness is there but the nerve is not, that is a different and much smaller problem. The thing standing between you and the unedited sentence is about twenty seconds long.
Some people will not be into it. Let them not be into it. That is not a cost you are paying, it is the filter doing its job, and you were never here for the people who would only have liked the edit.
You are not here for anybody who would only have liked the edited version.
The invitation
I built this place on the assumption that a room full of people being specific in public is a better room to be in, and nothing that has happened since we opened has argued with me about it.
The members other people gravitate toward in here are never the smooth ones. They are the ones with the weird ongoing project, the one who names their pots, the one who cannot stop talking about a glaze, the one who brings the ridiculous reference photo. Not because being odd is a strategy. Because being unmistakably somebody is the thing other people can actually get hold of.
Come as the whole thing. There is room.
And if you have been the edited version for long enough that you are not sure what the unedited one even wants to make, that is fine and it is common and it comes back fast. Start with the thing you would make if you knew for a fact that nobody was ever going to see it. Then make that, in public, on a Tuesday.
Start with the thing you would make if you knew for a fact nobody was ever going to see it. Then make that, in public, on a Tuesday. Some people will not be into it, which is the filter working rather than a cost you are paying.
Be yourself and your people will find you. It is slow, and it is the only version that holds.
DanDan Pearce, founder of The Clay HoleDraper, Utah
P.S. If the phrase the weird one made you flinch, note that I did not say the difficult one or the rude one. Being fully yourself has nothing to do with being hard to be around. Most of the unapologetic people in this building are also the kindest ones in it, and I do not think that is a coincidence.
P.P.S. The single best thing that happens in this building is still watching somebody realize, halfway through a sentence, that they do not have to finish it the safe way.
If you want more of this: Everybody in Here Already Knows Each Other is how you get into the room, and this one is who to be once you are in it.
And on the version of this about your work: Comparison Is the Thief of Joy.
Both come out as plain text with nothing hidden behind a tap.