Embracing Failure

Whenever I start to feel like a failure, I know that’s my cue to try to become even *more* of a failure - to fail harder, more often, and more consistently.

Failure is a close friend and ally to success, ingenuity, creativity, and progress, and it’s a thing that reliably moves me forward, builds capacity and resiliency, and gets energy moving.

So now whenever the thought “I’m a failure” comes up, I try to follow it with, “I sure hope so.”

Because I sincerely hope I never stop collecting failures. I hope I will always be someone who is willing to fail and ready to leap into risk and uncertainty.

So if you’re feeling bummed out by a recent failure: congratulations! You were brave and tried a thing! And making that a habit reliably leads to good things.

Paths of Failure

One of the life goals I set for myself (when I was about 14 years old) was to learn Spanish. Committing to that process is one of the most important things I’ve done in my life.

Not because of the awesome new skill it gave me but because it broke something in me that needed to break.

I took a Spanish class my first semester of college that felt like an absolute disaster: an endless series of humiliating failures (obvious evidence of my complete ineptitude), that agonizingly specific feeling of embarrassment and despair in those frozen moments when I couldn’t find the words, the C (gasp!) I got on my midterm.

But as anyone who has learned a new language (or done any hard thing ever) knows, reaching a goal is simply a matter of failing well, productively, and consistently.

So there was a choice to make: I could choose a different major and return to what came easy for me, or I could commit to that path of failure.

To get what I wanted, my identity had to change – from smart person to determined person, from person who gets straight A’s to person who commits to processes of learning, from person who succeeds a lot to person who fails a lot.

I am thankful I had Spanish to remind me that I am not here (that I did not come all this way into this dimension of time and space!) to hold my breath so as not to disrupt some frozen stasis of perfection I’m clinging to for dear life. I am not here to serve or uphold models of smartness, goodness, or success that other people made up. I am here to get gritty and dirty – to come into fierce contact with the world and my own self.

And here’s the thing: I speak Spanish almost every day, and it’s often still a colossal failure. I still lose words or say them poorly. I still have to ask people to repeat themselves. But I have also traveled alone in other countries with Spanish. I have assisted clients in accessing services, navigating the legal system, and creating safety plans with Spanish. And I have had conversations with hundreds of people I would not have been able to speak with had I not chosen this path of failure.

And what I know now that I did not know then is that there is no ultimate arrival or success – only beautiful milestones along a path of infinite failures.

I believe that part of what it means to be human is to take ourselves to our edges, to have our identities shattered and recreated, to surrender to what it means to be a beginner, to let go of where and who we are to embrace an ongoing process of becoming. This is what I came here for. And I like it a lot.

To the Edge

For several years now I’ve wanted to take a dance class. This summer, I’m finally doing it.

I took ballet and tap around age 5, but after that, my extracurricular endeavors took a different turn - toward those that pretty much exclusively required athletic power and brute strength over artful grace and coordination. And 24 years later, that definitely shows.

I can’t quite decide how good or bad I am at dance now, but the instructor did pull me aside several times this week for extra instruction if that’s any indication.

There’s a lot of floundering and flailing that happens as I learn the steps, try to get the technique right, and attempt to coordinate all that with what my arms are supposed to be doing. (Although I will say I have some powerful jumps - definitely not the most graceful to be clear, but I do get some height and distance, so there’s that.)

Here’s what I’ve concluded four weeks in: feeling like an inept fool is an important human experience we should all be having more often.

In a small way, dance is taking me to an edge of myself, and there’s something essential about that.

It’s making my brain and body work together in different ways. It’s taking me into fun and humor through detours of frustration, failure, and embarrassment. It’s expanding my sense of what’s possible inside of and through my body.

Also: there’s something magical about those series of hard-won baby triumphs that come (slowly and painfully) when we learn a new skill we’re uncomfortably bad at when we start.

So let’s not forget to keep learning and following what fascinates us - pushing our edges, finding delight in our capacity for growth, embarrassing ourselves, and having fun doing it.

All of this awesomeness is part of what we got when we came into this world as human creatures, so even (and especially) when there’s hard stuff swirling around us, brutal and relentless, let’s make good use of this goodness and allow it to fuel our journeys ahead.