You cannot watch and make at once

A woman in Manama sells hand-sewn children's clothes from her home, and three evenings a week she films a short video to show them.

The phone leans against a stack of books. She holds up a dress, turns it, talks about the stitching. And every few seconds her eyes leave the dress and go to the little picture of herself in the corner of the screen. Is the light right. Does her hand look awkward. Is she smiling too much.

You can see it in the result. It is a video of somebody watching a video.

Making a thing and observing yourself make it are different jobs. One faces the work. The other faces the audience and pretends to be them. Both are useful. The observer catches the bad light and the clumsy turn of the wrist. But the observer is a poor maker, because making asks you to be lost in the dress for a minute, and nobody can be lost and checking at the same time.

This is why the best people at almost anything are often bad witnesses to their own process. Ask how they did it and many genuinely cannot say. They were not looking. They were doing.

So the answer is not to stop observing. It is to give the observing its own hour. Film with the little picture covered. Talk to the dress, not to the corner of the screen. Then later, with a cup of tea, become the critic.

Two jobs, two sittings. Trying to do both in the same minute is how a person ends up doing neither well.