The dressmaker and the passers-by

A dressmaker in Ras Al Khaimah has a small stall where women walk past every afternoon and almost never stop.

Her explanation is ready. They do not understand good fabric. They only want what they saw online. They cannot tell a hand-finished seam from a machine one. If they did, the queue would reach the car park.

Perhaps. But notice who is being persuaded in that explanation. Not the women walking past. Her.

We like to think we are hard to fool. The salesman, the slick advertisement, the too-good offer: other people fall for those. Yet nobody has more access to us, more patience, or more motive than our own mind. It tells us we are the overlooked talent, or the fraud about to be found out, or the expert surrounded by people who simply do not get it. All three are stories, and we write them for an audience of one.

The way out is a dull question. Is it working?

If people keep walking past, they may be telling her something true. Not that the dresses are bad, but that the story around them is missing a piece. Maybe the stall looks like every other stall. Maybe nothing signals what makes her different until you are already holding the hem. The market is not always right, but it is rarely random.

There is a version of self-belief that keeps people going through lean months, and that kind is worth keeping. The other kind, the one that explains away every silence, slowly closes the eyes. It stops you improving the work, and it leaves you bitter in the meantime.

Before we can persuade anyone else, we have to stop persuading ourselves. Sometimes the people walking past have seen something we have not.