Why Creative Failure (Even When Uncomfortable) Is Important

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This weekend I had a brilliant idea: I was going to become one of those girls with beautiful manicured nails, sporting a different color every few weeks, changing them out for the seasons. And I was going to do it all myself at home.

So I purchased this polygel nail kit from Amazon which had great reviews and had been highlighted in an article that I found while doing my research about which kit to start with. I felt confident about my purchase. I had watched some videos of how to do polygel nails and I was feeling pretty good about being immediately good at it. I felt so confident, in fact, that I ended up purchasing a few other fun seasonal colors in addition to the 6 that the kit came with. I was all set and ready to become one of those it girls overnight, I just had to wait for my kit to arrive.

It got to me on a Sunday, and I was so excited to have a day with nothing ahead of me except for relaxing with my husband and wathcing some football. I decided that starting my nail adventure during the football game would be a fun way to do something with my hands while watching. So I got out the kit, and was immediately overwhelmed by all of the pieces.

Don’t get me wrong, it is a great kit and comes with literally everything you need to get started— all the nail tools, the UV light, a base coat and top coat, and several different colors. But I wanted to be thorough before starting, so I read through the directions a few times while identifying the individual pieces I would need in each step of the process. It seemed pretty straightforward so I jumped right in.

I did as the instructions said, started by cleaning and filing my nails with all the materials provided. Then, I painted my nails with the bottles instructed, some sort of nail dehydrator and acid-free primer. I was feeling confident, my nails were looking good and I was feeling great. I put on the base coat and cured my nails for a minute each hand like instructed, and I thought— wow this is so easy, I will be doing this every day. I love feeling like I’m being creative and taking care of myself with a new hobby.

And then— the polygel step came. Let me first tell you, there is nothing wrong with the kit, the instructions were perfectly clear and I felt like I knew exactly what I was supposed to be doing. They even had warnings for first timers, ‘if you’re new, only use a bean-sized amount of gel’ and ‘the polygel is sticky and sometimes hard to squeeze out of the tube, this is expected.’

I felt like I was ready to go and have a picture perfect manicure in a few minutes’ time. But then I remembered one user’s comment— that it took her 5 HOURS to do her nails the first time she used this kit. And this was actually overall a positive review— she liked the kit but just wanted to let others know it took her a while to figure it out. And then I started to get worried. I followed the instructions for putting the gel right on my nails. You’re supposed to squeeze a little gel onto the nail and then brush it with some sort of solution that makes it easier to spread. Sounded simple enough. For my first nail, I squeezed what seemed like a conservative amount of gel on and brushed it with the solution. But I found that the gel was so thick and sticky, it was hard to get it to flatten out without thinning it out too much with the liquid— so I ended up with a patchy (and sticky) mess of a first nail. But I figured this was my first time and it would get easier.

By the time I was done with my first hand and decided to cure the nails, it already looked like a mess. The color was a bit lighter than it appeared in the instructions, so I was left with almost skin-colored nails that were patchy and lumpy, and the color did not look good. So I figured I would do what they do in the salon with gel polish— put another layer on to make the color darker. This was also not a good choice, as I ended up getting even more of the gel on my skin surrounding my nails and made it look like even more of a disaster.

Then I remembered they had these nail press on things that I wasn’t sure how to use, but thought it might be worth a shot. Basically, you paint the gel onto the plastic nail, make sure it’s flush to your nail, cure it, and then when you remove the plastic, you can shape and file the nail to your liking. This seemed WAY simpler, so I decided to try that on the hand that I had already done 2 layers of gel on (and could NOT get off, btw. Which is expected, but just thought I would let you know the curing machine definitely works). So, as you can expect, adding not one, but 3 layers of gel is probably not recommended. I ended up with nice looking nails but they were SO thick and uncomfortable because some of the gel had stuck to my skin from all of the repeats of the polygel process.

Overall, I was feeling very discouraged, but the nails on my left hand did actually look okay. So I decided to try my right hand with just the nail press on technique, hoping they’d come out better with the correct amount of polygel on them. Unfortunately, this also ended up in a sticky mess— I was trying to paint the polygel onto the plastic, and then press on each individual nail before curing them— but the difficult part (which was warned about in the instructions) was squeezing the gel out of the tube. So I kept messing up the nails I had already pressed on and were waiting to be cured, getting gel on my skin in the process. They came out looking a mess because not all of the plastic nails were pressed flush to my nail, and so they came out with gaps and bubbles and looking generally a mess.

All in all, I left feeling really discouraged and kind of stupid and embarassed. I had one hand that looked okay, but the gel was so thick I knew it was going to get uncomforatable. The other hand had nails that were cracked in places and just looked a mess. I was reisgned to just picking the gel off and probably ordering one of those portable nail sander machines for the gel that was too caked on. For the rest of the night, I felt disappointed in myself that I wasted a few hours of my Sunday on a failed project. I even asked my husband if he thought it was a waste of time or if I was a failure. I was feeling really down and couldn’t shake it off for a bit. This is hard to admit that something as trivial as failing at doing my nails got me to such a low place, but unfortunatley, this is not new for me.

This is kind of a theme in my life— feeling like if I’m not naturally good at something the first time, I should be embarassed and never try it again. It’s honestly why it took me so many years to start a blog, a huge fear of failure.

But waking up the next day with a clear head, I realized something: I need to learn to be okay if I’m not good at something the first try. With my ADHD, I tend to start a lot of hobbies and leave them half-finished or never touch them again. I was feeling a lot of shame that this purchase might be another one of those failed ventures. But then I realized, as my husband pointed out, that it was my first time at this process. It had a lot of steps and there are a lot of things you can’t really put into instructions. It’s actually okay that I was so bad at it the first time— and instead of putting all the supplies in a cupboard never to be looked at again, I am going to make another attempt with the new information that I have from my first failure.

In retrospect, I realized I would have done a LOT of things differently with what I know now. And that’s only because I tried and failed— there was no other way to learn this. I think that preparing all the individual nails with the polygel solution beforehand would be a huge game changer. Also, I know in the salons you cure all your nails at once— but as a novice, I think that making sure each individual nail looks good and curing them individually might help me minimize the sticky mess and the gaps in the nails that I ran into because of the chaos the first time.

So oddly, even though I felt so down about this misadventure in become a nail girlie, I think it is an imporant lesson. It’s okay not to be good at everything. It’s actually okay if I never get good at this. But the important part is that I don’t let one failed attempt knock my self-esteem so hard that I never try it again. Because who knows, maybe one day you’ll hear me touting my success stories about getting into nails on this blog, or maybe, it’ll just be a worthwhile lesson in going easy on yourself, no matter the outcome.