Oh God Oh Shit Oh FUCK

And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

"It's red on the inside?"

Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.

"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. [...]

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.

let people love you

accept help

do the hard thing and do it scared

we went back and forth for 30 seconds and it got awkward really fast because it turns out all my other roommates thought i just had a compulsive need or some sort of desire to deep clean the kitchen every sunday and they just left me to it.

when in reality i was meal prepping for the entire week every sunday and when i finished i cleaned up after myself obviously—wiped the counters down, scraped gunk off the stove, scrubbed the sink, and swept the floor.

took me 10 minutes but always left it looking great.

then i didn't use the kitchen the whole rest of the week because i'd just grab my prepped meals in the morning and go out for all-day fieldwork.

but apparently nobody else ever cleaned up after themselves at all when they cooked. like they'd just leave food on the stove and counters and drop shit on the floor etc. and not clean it up so they thought every monday morning the kitchen was "deep cleaned" simply bc there wasn't old food on every surface.

i was like, "...........i've noticed the kitchen is always messy when i use it on sundays but i've always figured someone just used it and didn't get around to cleaning it up yet and i didn't mind because i'm always about to make a mess anyway............y'all just use the kitchen like that all week?"