The first time I tried an oyster, I was six or seven and my parents had company over. I immediately gagged and spit it out on the plate. It was the worst thing I ever had in my mouth.

A few months ago, at a restaurant, my friend ordered some oysters and offered me one. I said thanks but I don’t like oysters, and then realized that I wasn’t sure if that’s true, because I had only ever tried one, in 1987, for one second.

So I tried it. It was fine. I get why people eat them, but I’d rather order something else. Mostly I felt silly for steering clear of them all this time, based on barely an eyeblink of real-life experience.

The fact that I let thirty-five years pass before giving the oyster a proper second look is an example of what I call the “kryptonite effect.” The moment you become averse to something, you begin to avoid engaging with that thing, so you never actually get to learn what it’s all about, including any affinity you might have for it. It becomes like kryptonite to you. Ease and comfort around it can never develop.

Learning the ins and outs of something requires that you let yourself experience it, but with this thing you have a rule that you don’t do that. So it remains entirely in the mind, as this withering, radioactive entity that you never get near and never look at closely, even while people around you handle it freely and enjoy it completely.

Perhaps it’s no great loss if you miss out on one of life’s great shellfish dishes, but the kryptonite effect can happen with things that matter a lot more. Depending on the person, it can lock down all sorts of would-be endeavors: making art, talking to strangers, traveling, driving a car, having dinner guests, getting in the pool, using a computer, exercising, doing math, eating exotic foods, singing out loud, training for a different career, changing your haircut, baking, volunteering, maintaining houseplants, joining a club, achieving written goals, going to parties, competing for a promotion, wearing brightly-colored clothing, venturing a joke or anecdote to a group of people, and a thousand other things.

I bet for every person there’s at least one normal activity they want to do — which others seem to do with an enviable freedom — but they’ve always avoided it like it’s a deadly radioactive substance. Perhaps early experiences with this activity were painful or embarrassing, so you just turned away from it. That’s all it takes to make it feel forbidden to you in this lifetime. Subsequent attempts to get into it, if there were any, were probably strained and half-hearted and quickly abandoned.

Getting genuinely familiar with the thing in question could melt away those fears and aversions rather quickly, but that can’t happen if you still regard it as a personal form of kryptonite.

For me it’s dancing. I love music, I love dancing (when other people do it), and I wish I could dance. But I basically don’t dance if I’m sober. I feel too self-conscious. It feels controlled and disconnected from the music. Then I try to correct for that, and end up contorting like Elaine Benes at her office Christmas party.

The logical thing to do would be to practice dancing when I’m alone — get familiar with it when I know nobody’s watching and there are no real stakes. Enjoy the music, find a groove, and add stuff in gradually. The self-consciousness is so intense, though, that even when I’m alone I immediately feel stupid and stop. It’s such a strong feeling. I remember trying to dance in my apartment eight or nine years ago, blinds drawn, and I was convinced that the downstairs neighbor could hear how bad I was by the way the floor creaked. How kryptonite warps the mind!

However, precisely because of the kryptonite effect, these sorts of attempts at breaking through have been few and infrequent, which means I’ve never really made a good, sustained one. We know how familiarity reliably dissolves the initial fear and awkwardness — the kryptonic radiation — of any activity, because sometimes circumstances require us to do the thing anyway. A job that requires you to use power tools daily will massively reduce your trepidation around power tools, freeing you to use them whenever you want to.

When perpetual avoidance is allowed, this familiarity never develops, and the kryptonite effect entrenches itself. The activity in question, however innocuous to everyone else, seems to wither your power and confidence whenever you get too close. Only by getting close despite the effect, and experiencing what dancing, algebra, or working with puff pastry is all about — rather than simply reacting to your old, scorned-outsider’s thoughts about it — can you neutralize the effect.

An Experiment

I’m going to do this with dancing. I want to put my body and mind through the experience of it, repeatedly, long beyond the usual quitting point, to find out what’s actually there for once. I joined a Udemy course on basic dance movement, and I’m going to do the whole thing and then see where I’m at.

In other words I’m going to head directly for the kryptonite, and see how long its half-life really is. I’ll dance how I dance, getting better at whatever I can, remaining in the sickly green rays as long as they’re there. If familiarity is the kryponite of kryptonite, going straight for it should be the most direct path to minimizing its effect. That’s the hypothesis anyway.

I’ll share what I discover on my experiment page. It feels impossible that this project won’t diminish the kryptonite effect somewhat, and also get me a decent bit better at dancing, given how little good-faith dancing experience I actually have.

Do you have a kryptonite effect in your life? What would it mean to you to to be able to do the thing in question freely? What would happen if you went straight for the kryptonite?

***

Images from Freepik and elsewhere