The Art of Unlearning
I moved out of my house when I was 18.
New people, new customs, a different way of speaking, a different way of doing things. I had to figure out how to fit into a new environment without really knowing what I was doing. Looking back, I think a lot of growing up was learning things I had never needed to know before.
That part of growth has always come naturally to me. I like learning. I like asking questions, taking things apart, and figuring out how they work. There is something satisfying about realizing you don’t know something, then slowly getting to the point where you do.
But I’ve started to notice that learning isn’t always the hard part.
Sometimes the harder thing is letting go of something you already learned.
We spend so much time trying to build ourselves up. Learn more. Get better. Add another skill, another habit, another idea. I have always been drawn to that way of thinking. There is something comforting about being able to measure progress.
I’m also realizing that some things don’t work that way.
I think about this a lot through sports. I grew up playing squash competitively, and now I play tennis. Both have taught me how stubborn a learned behavior can be.
When you’re trying to fix a bad habit, knowing what you’re doing wrong is only the beginning. A bad swing. The wrong preparation. A foot that lands slightly too late. A tendency to reach for a ball instead of moving your feet.
You can understand the correction completely and still watch yourself do the old thing.
So you drill it. Again and again. You try to make the new movement automatic. But even after you’ve practiced it enough times that it feels right, the old movement doesn’t disappear. Under pressure, you sometimes fall back into it because it is still the thing your body knows best.
That part has always fascinated me.
You can know exactly what you are supposed to do and still do something else.
The frustrating part is that getting better often requires making yourself temporarily worse. You have to stop doing something that feels natural and replace it with something awkward. You have to be willing to play badly for a while because the old way is more comfortable.
And there is no shortcut around that.
I suspect life works like that too, although I’m not sure the analogy is as neat as I’d like it to be. We pick up ways of thinking and behaving from our families, friends, schools, cultures, and environments. Some of them help us. Some of them probably made sense at the time. Some just become habits because we have repeated them for long enough.
Moving to a new country made some of those things more obvious to me. Things I had thought were just normal turned out to be particular to where I grew up. The way I spoke to people. What I considered polite. How I spent my time. What I thought I was supposed to care about.
You don’t notice a lot of these things until you’re somewhere where they don’t quite work anymore.
I think that’s one of the strange parts of growing up. You spend your early years collecting pieces of yourself, and then, at some point, you have to decide which ones are actually yours.
I’ve always had a strong instinct to optimize things. Work harder. Practice more. Sleep better. Learn faster. If something isn’t working, figure out how to fix it.
That instinct has served me pretty well. It is also probably responsible for some things I am still trying to unlearn.
There are things you can’t optimize your way out of. Sometimes you need to stop practicing the wrong movement. Sometimes you need to accept that a habit that helped you before isn’t helping you anymore. And sometimes you need to leave something alone instead of turning it into another project.
That’s harder for me than it sounds.
Maybe that’s why I’ve started thinking of growth a little differently. I used to think of it mostly as accumulation: becoming better, knowing more, adding things.
Now I’m less sure.
Maybe some of it is subtraction.
Not because the things you learned were necessarily wrong, but because they belonged to an earlier version of you. You can be grateful for something and still decide you don’t need it anymore.
I don’t think I’ve gotten particularly good at this. I’m still learning how to notice when something has stopped serving me, and I’m probably going to keep getting it wrong.
But I like the idea that growth doesn’t always have to mean becoming more.
Sometimes it can mean making a little more room.