To The One Who Failed

PART TWO: A letter to myself, but maybe also to you

When I started writing this piece, I got stuck. There was a lot of loud internal commentary about whether or not I had anything meaningful to say about failure, considering the fact that I had already failed to write this for weeks and it wasn’t going particularly well now that I had started.

Since I couldn’t hear anything above the chatter, I opened a new document and transcribed that conversation, which became an internal memo series written as an email exchange between all these different parts of myself, which turned into Part One: A Failure Report For Failing To Report. (Imagine if the characters of Pixar’s Inside Out narrated the process of making Inside Out….it’s kind of like that).

When I returned to my original draft, I realized this essay was really it’s own kind of letter. A subtle (and not-so-subtle) response to that exchange and a sort of love note to myself, quietly reminding me of what I know to be true…when I can finally hear it.

So…here it is. I wrote it for myself, but also for you.

Photo Credit: Jerry Hsu

July 25, 2022

Hello Friend,

To begin, I just want to say that I’m sorry. That’s it. I’m just plain sorry.

I’m sorry it didn’t work. Or that it didn’t work out. Or that it isn’t working. I’m sorry that something bad happened when you were hoping for something good. I’m sorry you didn’t get what you wanted. I’m sorry it didn’t happen the way you wanted it to, maybe even needed it to. I’m sorry your hard work and your earnest effort didn’t pay off. I’m sorry what you tried fell short of expectations. I’m sorry what you made missed the mark you were aiming for.

Whatever size or shape this failure has taken, whether it’s personal or professional or relational, permanent or recoverable, mistake or rejection or total flop, it doesn’t make a difference. Because it all hurts and it’s all hard and so- I’m sorry.

And I want you to know that we can sit here, me in my sorry-ness and you in your sadness, for as long as you’d like. 

I will not hurry up and assure you that it’ll all work out. I won’t promise that something better is coming, that this wasn’t meant for you, that it’ll be ok, that you’ll bounce back. I won’t talk to you about open windows and closed doors. I won’t tell you that you’re strong or that this will make you stronger. Because, even if all of that is true, I know it doesn’t feel that way right now (and because you’ve probably heard it all already). 

The thing is, it’s not that you don’t know those things. It’s that you don’t believe them. 

Because failure creates doubt and doubt waters the fears that were already seeded in the ground. Because it isn’t just a missed deadline, a bad grade, a lost job, unrealized potential, a dream ended, an expensive mistake. It isn’t even just an unmet expectation- voiced or silent, public or private. Knotted up, at the very root, is what it means. 

Failure can become a commentary on your ability, your capability, maybe even your worth or your worthiness. Failure can get really loud about who you are. 

Of course, in your mind you know there’s a difference. You are not what you do. But when you’re shaking it all out, the black and white facts of it are hard to separate from the parts of yourself you used to color it all in. The picture of a future you imagined on top of it.

‘It failed’ can easily become ‘I failed’ and it’s not a big leap from there to ‘I am a failure.’

I’ll admit, in the past, I rushed through this part. Quick to fill up on those empty calorie encouragements, buoyed by all the hot air so I could bounce right back, as if it never happened. But it did happen. And pretending didn’t stop the problem from hardening into proof that quietly stacked up against me. Fear of failure never forgets.

But maybe that’s the problem. The fear of failure prevents us from being able to see the function of it. It’s not personal, it’s just part of the process. 

In school, I would only raise my hand when I knew the answer, never to ask a question. I was graded on my memorization of information, not by my understanding of it. I was good at school, but I wasn’t good at learning. I’m still not. I’m new at it.

After school, I cultivated a perfectionism that was celebrated by the hard work and hustle culture I came up in. There were things that came easily to me and I curated my life around those natural aptitudes. I don’t mean that to toot my own horn, more to sound a warning bell, alerting me to all the places where I traded smallness and knownness for security and confidence.

Now that I am growing past my givens, I am having to question all my defaults. I am learning how to learn while also learning how to manage my time and workflow and creativity based on what works for me, not how I was told it worked. I am learning how to redefine who I am based on who I am, not what I do. I am learning how to measure the success of an experiment by what I learned, not whether or not it worked how I expected it to the first time around. I am learning to think of everything as an experiment, because (hopefully) we are always learning. We are always in process.

I think we can all recognize that we are constantly consuming finished products, measuring our first drafts against someone else’s final act. Even behind-the-scenes footage and process documentation are filtered to be just the right amount of rough and imperfect, edited to be linear and well-paced and ultimately lead...somewhere…a finished product, an inspiring success, a poignant resolution, some kind of worthwhile payoff. We know this isn’t real, intellectually, but we don’t internalize that, really. 

I suppose my hope is that this letter, and the ones that follow, might help to crack that illusion for all of us. Maybe if we talk more about muddling through the mess from the middle, we’ll stop expectantly editing the story toward some kind of tidy end.

I don’t know how you’ve arrived here or what internal commentary is narrating the story of how it all happened and why. But I do want to interrupt to say just one thing:

You tried something and it failed.

But you are not a failure.

You are just learning.

Love,

Tami

P.S. Write back soon.

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Whether you’re in the thick of it right now or you’ve felt this way in the past, I’d like to turn this page into a care package of support that we can bookmark to return to anytime we need.

Would you help me out and use the comments section below to share a book or podcast or article or anecdote or any other kind of resource or balm that you’ve found helpful when you felt this way? 

Let’s stock our medicine cabinet for the next time we come down with a case of the failures!