twilightpony | Fear Of Failing

Ugh, this place is a mess. The kitchen is a disaster area, the entrance hall is a swamp, and there is the smell of burnt cake everywhere. Starlight Glimmer had a bit of a magical mishap. The good news is that nopony got hurt, although my friends are probably going to have some pretty bad headaches tomorrow. The day started out so well.

This morning, bright and early, Starlight Glimmer and I had a fun magic duel as a way for her to show me the spells she had been studying the most. She's very strong, and although she lacks a little in the delicate tuning of her spells, she's very good at cranking them out in quick succession and she has even been experimenting in combining some rather obscure spells. For instance, she showed me an innovative spell combination that allowed her to oscillate positions so fast that she seemed to be two places at once. That last one looked tiring and probably too hard to control to be useful. Sadly, the one part of her magic studies that she has been neglecting is the study of Friendship. She had her list of the spells she had mastered on hoof and I noticed the lack of completed friendship exercises and summaries of lessons experienced. So before Spike and I left for Canterlot, I asked her to complete a practical friendship activity, with the understanding that we'd discuss how it went when I got back this evening. Starlight Glimmer decided that to impress me, she would not tackle just one friendship lesson. She'd tackle five.

She invited our five Ponyville friends over, Rarity, Pinkie, Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy and Applejack, with the object being to do something each of our friends enjoys doing. That counts as following the letter of the friendship lesson but with no real understanding of the intent of the lesson. So all five friends arrived at the Friendship Castle and Starlight found herself with the problem of participating in five different incompatible activities at once in four different areas of the castle. She decided to solve this problem with magic, but not with the magic of friendship.

The magic of Friendship is the magic of cooperation, of understanding and of trust. It's a magic of synergy and quite different from the usual forceful, manipulative magic that we are taught in magic kindergarten. It's subtle and not something that you can glean by having five friends start five different projects and then leave them pretty much alone. Long story short, Starlight Glimmer, to get everpony to agree with her on what she felt would be the most efficient path to getting all five tasks completed simultaneously, cast a combination compulsion spell on my friends, and made them act like model employees. Thus, she did not learn anything about friendship, but I do hope that she learned to not turn ponies into meat puppets.

I had hoped that friendship would give her the support and confidence she needs to do something that she can be passionate about. She's good at studying and keen to show me that she's adept at magic, but I still don't see that confidence. It's that confidence that would have allowed her to relax with her friends and learn her friendship lessons one at a time. Instead, she tried to approach friendship as a chore, and she tried to do five chores at once by taking cooperation and teamwork out of the equation.

So I got home to six sopping wet ponies, five of which were in a spellbound trance, with rain clouds and smoke drifting down the halls, and wet furniture, pictures, cloth and spiders everywhere. The kitchen looks like a tornado blew through it, and then it caught fire. I managed to undo the compulsion spell so my friends could go home. All that because Starlight Glimmer was afraid to be less than perfect at something she's not naturally good at. Like sewing. And baking. Tomorrow, Starlight Glimmer is going to have to learn how to apologize to her friends. Tonight, I'm going to go out to watch for shooting stars. Then I'm going to bed.