Issue #90: Trusting the process

Or, why I'm glad I didn't paint my bathroom green.

Sometimes, the process feels like an endless game of Snakes & Ladders.

I did some painting over the weekend. Which is a grandiose way of describing what I actually did: painting the underside of three wallpaper scraps in varying shades of green and blue, before taping them to spots on my bathroom walls. Half an hour later, I pulled them all down and tossed them in the bin.

I was so sure, last Saturday, that I knew what I wanted – that the decision was a simple choice between three Farrow & Ball shades. I’d already tried out lookalike colours on the Dulux visualiser app, ‘painting’ the walls with a tap of my index finger. I started a Pinterest board, a full month ago, devoted to ‘small green bathrooms’. I consulted friends and family. But in the end, I had to go through the rigmarole of a 40-minute round trip to the shop, £15 dropped on sample pots and an hour spent, quite literally, watching paint dry before I truly do not want a green bathroom.

Which was an annoyance, but only a minor one. Impatient as I am, I’m well aware the sunk cost here – of time, effort, money – was low compared to the alternative: an all-green bathroom I despise every time I walk into it.

It was a process. One that is tried and tested, familiar to anyone who’s ever agonised over paint colours. One which, if I were trained in the visual arts, like my architect friends who produce countless sketches and iterations before coming to their final design, I would understand as a necessity.

No part of me would judge myself for not getting it right the first time. I wouldn’t berate myself for how long it took, either – because it would be plainly obvious to me that living with a decision I regretted would be so much worse.

As I turn 33 (today, in fact), I’m challenging myself to apply that same patient, dispassionate philosophy to my own life. Because, the truth is, I am at this not-so-young, not-so-old age, struggling to afford myself the same patience. To trust my own process, without that insidious voice in my head whispering things like, it’s taking too long, it will never work out.