Two years ago, the idea of me being a bowling enthusiast was not on my radar. After all, before I went bowling in June of 2021, I hadn’t been since I was in high school.
It wasn’t necessarily because I hated bowling. I mean, I did, but it was because I was embarrassed about bowling. Because in addition to having ectrodactyly in both hands, each hand posed its own set of challenges.
On my left hand, each of my three fingers is missing joints, meaning I have absolutely no flexibility. My right arm doesn’t supinate properly, meaning I can’t fully rotate my right arm to have my palm facing upwards. This condition, I recently found out, might be rarer than having ectrodactyly.
For years, I avoided bowling because I didn’t know which hand to throw the ball with and hated constantly rolling it in the gutter turn after turn.
But in 2021, my girlfriend dragged me along to bowl with a few of her friends, and after two straight games of scoring under 25, something clicked.
“We need to go again,” I told her.
A week later, we went again, the week after that we went again, and then we discovered the alley we were going to was selling summer passes. For just fifty dollars, we could bowl three games a day with shoes included from the time we bought them until the beginning of September.
In two months, I went from hardly being able to hit a pin to scoring maxing out at 163.
I enjoy bowling now because I’m not abysmally bad at it. Whenever I go, I am trying to hit a new max score (and I am still trying to surpass the 200 threshold).
But normally, I wouldn’t have even given my chance to get better at the sport.
I love learning, I hate being bad at something. Usually, this means that if I don’t pick up on something early into being introduced, I will stop trying immediately. Essentially, I love learning things that are easy to learn.
(Is that actually the love of learning?)
Had I not figured out how to bowl during the last round of that June 2021 attempt, I would have never wanted to bowl again.
Getting better at bowling won’t alter the course of my life. Bowling will always be a recreational thing I do for fun, with my girlfriend, and with other friends.
But is scoring in the twenties on a regular basis that bad if it’s around people you enjoy? After all, bowling is one of the most socially acceptable sports to be bad at.
I’ve been thinking about some of the stuff I’ve missed out on because I was too stubborn to wait out a long learning curve. Last year, when I finally started on YouTube, I found out that the editing software learning curve I thought would be too over my head was actually incredibly learnable.
Even when it took me over an hour to learn how to track an image onto a video, and even though I constantly have to go back to relearn how to do it, it’s not as hard as it once seemed.
I’ve wondered if my resistance to video editing earlier because I didn’t think I could get better has cost me opportunities, whether independently or with other companies and channels. But this, like bowling, is eventually something I came around to.
One problem I have is identifying things I avoid doing and why I avoid doing them. I didn’t even realize my lifelong aversion to eating eggs was really more of a fear until one friend pointed it out.
But next time someone wants me to come along to do something I hate, I’ll give it a second (and third and fourth) chance before I give up on it for good.
Mitchell Barbee graduated from Calvin University with a B.A. in writing in 2021. Originally from Boone, North Carolina, he is currently residing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He enjoys hanging out with the few friends who stayed, wearing grey hoodies, and hoping that he doesn’t get sucked into the nightly wormhole of watching a baseball game.
