Being New Doesn't Last Forever

It's been a long time since I've done something that either doesn't come intuitively to me or that I haven't been doing for years. So, the last several months at my new job have been very hard for me. As much as I knew that a lot of the mistakes and misunderstandings I was experiencing came from being incredibly new, I've still been spent a lot of my time incredibly frustrated and in fear for my future.

I started in the hair industry 17 years ago this June. After 10 months of cosmetology school, I then had another six months of advanced training that I went through before being placed in a salon to build my own clientele. School wasn't so bad; people expect you to screw up there. Once, I even waxed most of one of my mother's eyebrows off. She eventually forgave me, and the eyebrow eventually grew back.

But the training program after school was tough in the beginning. Even though I knew I needed more training, I was so sure that I was such a hot-shit hairdresser from school that for a while all the additional training did was teach me how much I didn't know. I remember the first time I highlighted somebody's hair after learning the "right" way to do it. A procedure that had before taken me 40 minutes to perform took three hours. Halfway through the service, I walked into the back room, threw my hands up and proclaimed that I was tired and done. My manager didn't even bother to look at me as she told me to get my ass back out there and finish up what I was doing.

And there was the (first) time that I turned a client's hair orange while trying to get it blonde. She, proud new owner of pumpkin orange hair, sat there and told me everything would be all right as I cried hysterically. (Oddly enough, I had an eerily similar situation the first time, as a manager, that I had to fire someone.) And still, somehow I managed to become a pretty decent hair colorist over the years, if I do say so myself.

Even though I replayed these and many, many other similar situations in my head, over these last few months every time I've seen my writing heavily edited or somebody points out an error that I've failed to catch, I have beaten myself up over the inability to learn my job instantly. I even went through a tough couple of weeks of sleeping issues because I was so sure that I was going to get fired at any time.

A couple of weeks ago, my team supervisor gave me a really nice compliment based on a conversation she'd had with our managing editor. She told me how they felt I had risen to the occasion during a complicated and hectic time. (Due to unexpected events, I transitioned into my job with minimal supervision.)

That was a conversation that came at exactly the right time and, for some reason, finally made me objectively evaluate how I've been doing. And, you know what? It's not so bad. Even just the difference between how I launched the last issue of the magazine compared to the first issue I launched right before Christmas — well, it's night and day. For one, last month I didn't set my alarm for 4 a.m. to make sure that I hadn't screwed up the whole process. And the mistakes that I was making even in February — I'm not making them today.

So, am I saying that I've got my job down to an art and it's time to move onto something else? Not even in my dreams. But I'm making different mistakes now, having learned from past ones, and every one that I make helps me learn a new skill a little bit better. And I know that every day I'll feel more comfortable with what I do and my ability to do it. I've been telling myself this all along, but now, finally, I actually believe it, and I'm able to sit back and enjoy the process. Somewhat.

(Update: The morning after writing the first draft of this post, I made a totally dumbass but (thankfully!) correctable mistake at work. So, yeah, I've still got a long way to go before doing things with my eyes closed. But it still feels better than it used to!)