Peanut Buttering

I didn't realize I was practicing that skill until I stopped

It's easy to confuse being naturally good at something with having become good at something via practice.

This happened to me with writing.

For my entire primary and secondary educational life, I was writing, and I was always a pretty good writer for my level. However, after high school I enrolled in a STEM degree, followed by a STEM job, and did not have to write more than a token amount. And because I did not write, I had no feedback on my writing abilities.

Until eventually, many years after college, I sat down to write seriously and realized that in fact my skills had atrophied. I was no longer as good a writer as I remembered being.

What I find interesting is that I never realized I was training the skill of writing at all. The "progressive overload" of education -- the gradual heightening of challenge and intellectual complexity year after year -- provided the perfect stimulus to build writing abilities. But it was non-optional: it was just a given that you went to school, and that school had English class, and that English class required writing.

And because of this it did not feel like I was being trained to write in particular. I was learning new terminology, sure; I learned about zeugma and antimetabole and the five-paragraph essay and the thesis-antithesis-synthesis essay. I learned more words. But that just felt like knowledge, something I'd keep forever (with some natural forgetting), but not a skill, not something like muscle which would fade with disuse.

Further complicating things is that throughout school you also grow in the obvious way. You get older, and bigger. Are big kids inherently smarter because they're older, or is it because they've had more time to learn more stuff? It's not entirely clear to you, the younger kid, but that big kids are smarter is a given.

And so as an adult it was a shock to realize that in fact I had built a skill all that time, and that now I had lost it. I wasn't suddenly a worse writer -- the skill had declined in a very straightforward way, due to lack of usage (and, honestly, a decline in reading quality writing as well). It felt like a discontinuity merely because I had not taken time to observe this skill in many years. I had cached a thought that I was naturally good at writing, and had no opportunity to learn otherwise.

Here are a couple other phenomena that I think are related:

This is another post where I haven't yet crystallized whatever truth I'm circling around. But something here tickles me, and I hope that with some time to simmer I'll be able to revisit it at a later time with more clarity. Let me know if something resonates with you -- maybe your reaction will help me figure out mine!