Why doing things badly is still worth doing
By Millie · August 06, 2026
Who is the brownie? The short version, for anyone who wants it.
The kitchen brownie of folklore doesn’t perform. It works in the dark, for its own reasons, and vanishes the moment anyone tries to watch. Leave out an offering if you like. Applause is not the point. The point is the doing.
Most of us forgot that somewhere along the way.
The Note I Almost Hold
Singing is one of my things. Not well. Someone once told me I could “almost hold an unidentifiable note,” which is both accurate and, in its own way, a complete sentence. I sing anyway. In the car, around the house, wherever the music lands. Sometimes I catch myself getting embarrassed, an internal wince, a sudden awareness of being heard, and then I remember that I am not marketing my singing to anyone. I’m just in my kitchen with a song on.
The embarrassment doesn’t fully go away. But it stops being the point.
What My Hands Do Instead of What My Brain Intended
Drawing is another one. I have a tremor, which means what arrives on paper is never quite what I had in mind. The lines go where they want. The result is always, technically, unique, in the way that fingerprints are unique, because no one else’s hand would have made exactly that mark. I’ve made peace with this. Mostly. The gap between the image in my head and the thing on paper used to frustrate me enormously, and occasionally still does, but the drawing itself still does something that not drawing doesn’t.
Knitting produces unintended holes and lines that wander. These are features now. Probably.
The Performance Problem
The hardest part of picking up a creative hobby is the internal critic that arrives with it, usually dragging along whatever someone said to you about this thing when you were younger. You were told you couldn’t sing. You were told you had no artistic talent. You were told to leave the creative stuff to people who were naturally good at it.
That voice is annoying and persistent, and it’s not entirely internal either. There’s the external version too, the awareness of being heard or seen doing something imperfectly, the small social risk of being caught enjoying something you’re not good at. Both will show up. The question is whether you let them run the show.
Research on this is fairly consistent: engaging in creative activities for enjoyment rather than performance has measurable benefits for wellbeing, regardless of skill level. ¹ Your nervous system does not care whether the note was identifiable. It just knows you were present in something for a few minutes.
The Brownie’s Approach
The brownie works in the dark, thoroughly, for no audience and no outcome beyond the thing itself. No courses to optimise its output. No craft improvement arc for someone else’s benefit. Just the doing, because that’s what it’s there for.
Pick up the thing. Do it with the holes in and the wandering lines and the almost-note and the gap between what you imagined and what actually arrived on the page. The doing is the point, and the doing doesn’t require an audience to count.
Leave the offering out. The kitchen brownie is not taking requests, and frankly neither are you. Where Do You Even Start? A Crafter’s Honest Guide has the practical version of picking the thing up in the first place.
¹ A WHO scoping review drawing on over 900 publications found consistent evidence that engaging with creative activities for enjoyment, regardless of skill level, supports health and wellbeing. Fancourt, D., & Finn, S. (2019). What is the Evidence on the Role of the Arts in Improving Health and Well-being? World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe.