I almost threw it out. It was dusty, the wooden seat was cracked, and I had no idea what I was looking at. But something made me drag it into the light from the small basement window. I wiped it down. The metal was still solid. The flywheel still spun.

I didn't take a class. I'm not really a class person. I watched YouTube videos on my phone, propped against a coffee can full of old screws. "Centering clay," one video said, like it was simple. It took me two months to center anything. I'd come down after dinner, kick the wheel for an hour, and watch everything I made wobble off into a sad heap.

Nobody was watching me fail. That's the thing about teaching yourself—you get to be bad at something without an audience. —  Tom Richardson

I ordered twenty-five pounds of clay from a place in Parkersburg. It sat in my basement for a week before I opened it. When I finally did, the smell hit me—wet earth, mineral, something older than me. I wedged it badly. I threw it on the wheel badly. But I kept showing up.

By month three, I made a bowl that didn't collapse. It was lopsided, the walls were too thick, and the bottom had a weird bump. I kept it. It's on my kitchen counter now, holding spare change. Maya saw it once and said, "Did you make that?" I said yes. She didn't say it was good. She just nodded and said, "Huh."

Bill came down to see the setup one evening. He stood there looking at my collection of failures lined up on a shelf—the ones I couldn't bring myself to recycle back into the clay bag. "That's a lot of ugly bowls," he said. Then: "How does it feel? Making them?" I told him it felt like nothing else I do. Like my hands know something my brain doesn't.

I work down there maybe three nights a week now. Sometimes Elena stops by to drop something off and I hear her footsteps overhead while I'm kicking the wheel. Sometimes I make something I'm proud of. Mostly I make things that teach me what not to do next time. I've started firing pieces in a small electric kiln I found on Craigslist for $200. Half of them crack. I'm learning about that too.

Nobody taught me this. No workshop. No instructor correcting my hand position. Just me, the wheel, the clay, and a lot of patience I didn't know I had. I think that's why it matters to me. I found it myself. I'm figuring it out myself. And every bowl—even the ugly ones—is proof that I showed up and tried.

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