I recently started doing pottery out of boredom, and discovered that I love it/am obsessed with it. I spent 8 hours in the pottery studio in the last two days. It’s been a really great stress reliever and an outlet for me. School hasn’t been that stressful, but ideal protein has been really emotionally difficult. There are constant up days and down days, and the process of creating art from a lump of nothing helps me deal with this emotional roller coaster. Also, now that I actually have some concept of what I’m doing (after a week of constant practice) pottery gives me a lot of confidence. Today, I made a really nice, and somewhat difficult bowl in about 5 minutes. I loved the bowl at the end, and did it in a really short amount of time. I’ve spent a lot of time (when I’m not actually doing pottery) thinking about it and how it’s enriched my daily life and weight loss journey. It wasn’t until today that the analogy between sculpting and molding my body and sculpting and molding clay. When I first started last week, I would get really frustrated. The main barrier of pottery (for me) has been mental. If you do something to the clay, it will respond, but you have to believe that you can make it respond, and not that it’s controlling you. This is really important for working on the wheel; any tiny movement of your hand can make a huge difference: positive or negative. The most difficult part of throwing on the wheel is centering, which is basically turning a misshapen lump into a smooth, perfectly round shape. This is difficult because it requires keeping the hands absolutely still in one position while the clay spins around haphazardly bumping into them, until it eventually adopts the shape of the hands. This can take 30 seconds, or 5 minutes, depending on various factors like the moisture level of the clay, how still you actually keep your hands, how misshapen the clay is, how fast the wheel spins, etc. The biggest hurdle in learning how to center correctly is maintaining the position of the hands no matter what and knowing that eventually, the clay will yield to their shape. I think my frustration (and eventual accomplishment) with learning how to center clay is really similar to the frustration that I’ve had with losing weight. Results are happening, I’ve lost 25 pounds (the most I’ve ever lost), but I still feel frustrated and want it to happen faster. As with throwing, I need to believe that if I keep up with my program, which has worked amazingly thus far, I’ll continue to lose weight. A huge mental barrier for me is the fact that I’ve never seen myself not overweight, so I can’t really wrap my head around the concept of myself at a normal weight When you begin centering a lump of clay, it’s impossible to know what the finished product will look like. All you can do is move your hands through the right motions at the right time, and if you do everything correctly, you end up with a piece of art. It’s never perfect, but it’s beautiful.
