“There is only one way to eat an elephant: one bite at a time.”
The first time I heard this was in a previous job. The person who said it was, of course, using it in some kind of inspirational way to describe how we were going to tackle a very daunting project by divvying it up into smaller, more manageable pieces, and overcoming it that way.
Me, having never heard this phrase before and being the adult professional that I am could, of course, not stop the words from circling in my brain like water around a drain.
To this day, I can’t recall what the project was that I was working on at the time, only this phrase. Repeating. It ran on loop in my mind for days. It wasn’t because I didn’t get the meaning of it–I did. I think it was more because it was such an odd thing to me to use as an inspiration.
Eating an elephant is an experience that, by my best guess, nobody present had any “real world” experience doing and so the idea of being able to actually empathize with the strategy or method (or whatever you want to call it) and employ it as your own was highly unlikely. It was just a catchy, kind of silly/fun thing that people say to each other that may or may not actually lend itself to helping efforts. With the way my thoughts work, my brain held onto this and made me think about all the other weird things people say to each other that make little to no sense and yet we use them as a basis for guidance or decision-making anyway.
My avoidance of posting things these past few weeks is what made me think of this phrase.
I will step back a moment and explain that my plan as of my last post was to make another update at least mentioning what my planned projects are for 2022.
I meant to make this post last month before the end of the year and, obviously, I did not. What kept me from making it was this absurd thing I kept telling myself, not so unlike the concept of the figurative consumption of elephants that plagued my waking days all those years ago. It was this fabricated idea that I had to have a certain level of “readiness” before I sat down and wrote more words. What was that “readiness” defined as?
Hell if I know.
If I had to describe it at all, it was this very nebulous idea that whatever I was going to post about or show or announce to anyone, it had to be “presentable.”
But what did “presentable” mean?
I dunno.
Maybe it meant that things had to at least be “organized.”
But “organized” in what way?
Fuck.
There are a million different ways to organize thoughts and plans and website content and, and, and–
And heck it.
All this was, was me procrastinating doing a thing because of wanting to present to anyone watching a much more put-together and, honestly, completely artificial representation of the process of creating things (and of me). Which is completely opposite
The reason I wanted to start this blog and specifically wanted this format to showcase things is because I wanted to share with people the process of making them. Most importantly, I wanted to share the reality of that process and how it is not always refined or organized or presentable, especially not at first.
End products are formed from iterations of processes. Rarely, if ever, will the best product be discovered during the first iteration of a process. In order to find the best acceptable or ideal product for a given thing, you generally have to go through multiple iterations of these processes and in order to do that, you have to put some less than ideal things out there into the world. Multiple times. With everyone watching.
I know this. This is lit’rally part of my job.
Process development is part of what I do, yet I talked myself into this fallacy of “readiness.” I told myself that it had to be hit somehow, that there was this bar to be met even with never having tossed my costume work or this blog or this website as a whole into the public eye at all. Somehow, I was still expecting of myself some sort of fantastic end product to magically emerge with not having done anything before I could sit down and write a thing.
Well, lemme tell ya what: that’s silly.
Taking a step away from it, it’s as silly a thing to keep repeating to myself as the elephant-eating pep talk, even if the idea behind it was well intended (I only wanted to show you the prettiest things, you see). There are some situations where this idea of presentation and readiness matters but this is not one of them. I’m not building any of this for profit or under any contracts so there are no rules of what has to be in place, or by when, or how it needs to look before someone else sets an eye on it.
This is all an experiment as much as running through any new process is for the first time and the only way to get things looking better or running smoother or being “presentable” is to just put something out into the world, see how it goes, and take it one step at a time after that.
So that is what I’ll do.
Long tangent over, I did sit down and decide what little thing I wanted to share with y’all first and so I put together a starter page for planned projects for this year here.
So far it is just a handful of preview images to give you an idea of costumes and craft things I plan to tackle in 2022 providing nothing more apocalyptic happens than our current pandemic state of the world.
*knock on wood*
Eventually, I would like to expand these pages to hold more info about the projects (like project-specific galleries and hashtags used in my posts tracking their construction and everything on them) but that will come to be somewhere down the line between when my full-time work and actually working on these things permits.
Other things I plan to get up and running at some point are a Resources page where I will provide some links to online suppliers I’ve used for costume-making, tutorials other crafters have made available that I’ve found helpful, and possibly some free PDF downloads of things I’ve made like measurement sheets and patterns if I can figure out the best way to house them and get some pattern testers in the mix for that. Stay tuned for some project startup posts in the relatively near future.
Now get out there and don’t eat the elephant, but hold him delicately betwixt your arms to deliver a reassuring hug and gently whisper into his pendulous ear:
“Fear not, for tonight we dine on turtle soup.”
