working close to failure.

building muscle and developing strength for creative projects.

I’ve been strength training, which is rather unlike me, but please stick with me and I promise to land us in more familiar territory.

Earlier this month, Anna Maltby of How to Move convinced me that welcoming two sets of small dumbbells into my life would not negatively impact my physical environment (wine crate turned under-bed storage wins again!), and would positively impact my physical bod and brain. Being a woman of a certain age and living through January in this country I call home, I’ve been finding real comfort in doing Anna’s workout videos and in deliberately moving my very weary body toward improved strength. (Resistance training for the resistance? It certainly can’t hurt.)

If you, like the me of two weeks ago, are not someone who deadlifts weights on the regular, you might also not be familiar with the concept of working close to failure, but it’s something Anna talks about frequently. In resistance training, working close to failure means repeating an exercise until our muscles are juuuuust about ready to give up, but stopping before they actually do. Ending exercise repetitions before the point of total exhaustion, allows us to do things like build muscle mass and improve bone density, without setting ourselves up for soreness or injury.

While dutifully cranking eight-pound weights over my head this week, it occurred to me that working close to failure isn’t only something that’s helpful while pumping iron, but when tackling creative projects, too. Creativity is a muscle, et cetera, but actually!

Here’s a tiny example: Last week, Zinzi Edmundson of Treehouse shared a serendipitous tutorial for making a folded paper pendant. I’m not really in the market for a pendant right now, but I am actively seeking a solution for the bare bulbs above my bed and so I was glad to have another possible lighting solution to tinker with.

And how I’ve been tinkering! I’ve folded golden sheets of VERY NOISY parchment paper. I’ve cut and folded long lengths of my children’s easel paper. I’ve deigned to crease the single sheet of beautiful Italian paper I’ve been saving for something else, and when my first attempt didn’t work out right, I ironed it smooth to begin again. It’s now so soft at the creases of its very many folds that it will likely vanish into thin air, but at least the effort was valiant.

Every day this week, for an undisclosed length of time, I’ve worked excruciatingly close to failure and when I’ve felt juuuust about ready to crumple my various prototypes into little balls of loathing and defeat, or else settle on something not quite right, I’ve set them down and walked away.

Like weightlifting, this is not something that comes particularly naturally to me!

I’ve been known to muscle through projects in a trance-like state, forgoing lunch and forgetting to turn on the lights as the sun sets because I just. have. to. get. it. finished. Shockingly, this approach rarely works out well. The project might get finished, but it’s imperfect and comes at the cost of my very last nerve. At one point this week, I very nearly settled for an overhead light that bore a distinct resemblance to a shed pupa case!

Annoyingly—and mercifully—when I’m able to stop myself before getting to the point of exhaustion, when I put a project away for a bit before letting myself get undone by it, when I allow myself the space to just come back to it later, I return with creative muscles that really do feel a little stronger, a little more capable of the challenge, a little bit more bulked up.

Friends, I have not yet figured out a way to turn this pendant into a shade that will work with my particular fixture. I have not yet become the World’s Strongest Woman. But I am getting closer. I can feel it.