failure

“It’s okay to fail, we all fail.”

The text message came through my phone in response to one sent saying ‘I thought I’d found the perfect solution for something at work, and my boss came back saying it was the wrong direction. I hate failing.’

A little dramatic of me, lets be honest.

My therapist taught me to see how much pressure I put on myself to never ever fail, to always be perfect, that mistakes are not allowed to be made.

It seems to be this phenomenon in the world. This concept that failing is bad. I see it in myself and in my friends, this constant pressure to be the perfect version of ourselves all the time, and have the right answers.

However, there is also this loud voice in the world that says ‘you cannot succeed unless you fail.’

As Beyonce, the ever wise, said in her 2020 commencement speech ‘There may be more failures than victories. Yes, I’ve been blessed to have 24 Grammys, but I’ve lost 46 times. That meant rejection 46 times.”

More failures than victories for one of the most successful women on the planet at the moment. She went on to say that it is through surrender to the cards you are dealt and a commitment to work hard; it is through those things that she has also had victory. Also see Michelle Obama as another champion of this.

This is something that I am only just realising now; that when I was a child when I start something new and did it wrong, my reaction was to run away, I didn’t want to get back up and try again. I don’t know what caused that but it carried into adulthood.

Now I am learning that the discomfort of failure is the way of life. If I fail at something, I can acknowledge it and get back up again. I can learn from what I did and keep going. I still hate it, it still causes this reaction in me to hide in a corner and never be seen again, but I am learning to fight that urge.

My friend is right, so is Beyonce, so is Michelle Obama (although honestly when is she wrong?) we all fail. It is part of life.

The crazy part of this is that the situation that started this post wasn’t a big deal, my boss wasn’t bothered. But in a new job a few weeks in, my expectation of myself was to make no mistakes. In my head it was a bigger deal than it was for her. I hadn’t allowed myself the space to fail in the process of learning the ropes. In the process of doing something new.

So I am learning to step back and examine what it was I was doing; step back and see how failure is universal and normal; ask what can I learn, and examining if it really is as big a deal as I made it in my head. And honestly, it’s probably not.

R.

image credit: https://www.glamour.com/gallery/10-michelle-obama-quotes-we-need-now-more-than-ever