I fail therefore I am (a faliure)

AUGUST 2022

I have a tendency to feel like nothing that I accomplish will ever be enough. I don’t have the smarts, the skill, the guts. I’m too tall, I’m too short, I’m too scattered. I mostly feel this way when I am not instantly great at something. Not being immediately perfect is a punch to the gut that shouldn’t even exist in the first place. But I feel like a complete fraud, a failure in everything that I do.

I don’t know where along the line it started. I definitely fell hundreds of times before I learned to walk, and I definitely misspelled “definitely’ hundreds of times before I quit and googled it for this essay (and subsequently copied and pasted it). My knees and elbows are covered in scars from learning to ride my bike, and my dad’s car is massively scratched from me pulling into my friend’s driveway for the first time. My point is, I fear that if I were to learn to walk today, I would quit after the first scraped up knee. I would stay stationary forever, because I failed once and obviously that indicates that my entire life is a failure. The only reason I write so much, even though I picked it up relatively recently, is because I had an authority figure openly believe in my work (thank you Mr. Z for everything). And even then, I have hundreds of Untitled Documents with three or four surviving sentences written down after hours of writing and deleting and writing and deleting. Each personal failure cuts deep, to the point where it feels like I have violated a sacred moral code by not succeeding and am therefore I am a terrible person. The least valued player in the cult of the Hustle. The word for all of this seems to be imposter syndrome. But that begs the question of if I’m even good enough to have imposter syndrome. My insecurities are bundled in even more insecurities, tightly wound and confining.

I need to break out of the comfort of surrendering, but I’m not entirely sure how. I think it starts with understanding that failure is not always a moral slip up. It’s okay to burn the pancakes you are making without having to punish yourself by starving. It’s okay to get a strike at the batting cage and still swing on the remaining balls. It’s okay to be a human being, as long as you’re growing and learning. And I think that’s what it’s all about. Growing and learning. Moving forward onto an unknown path, which will most certainly be boobie-trapped, but nothing you can’t handle, instead of hanging out in the visitors lodge.

I think I also need to understand that there is beauty in imperfection. I have fallen in love with the jankiest, most questionable, downright creepy works of art and taken them home with me. My favorite music genre consists of rough vocals over out of tune guitars. My favorite statues at museums usually have their noses or arms broken off from age and poor preservation. My favorite people have a tendency to stumble over their words and my favorite shoes have miscellaneous stains on the canvas from work, paint, puddles, and unknown sidewalk goo. I don’t love them any less because of these faults and very rarely do I find myself wondering if I would love them more if they were “perfect”, and the answer is… probably not. Most definitely not.

I am my own scarred up, endearingly slimy, somewhat idiosyncratic, person. And I am going to challenge myself to publish this essay instead of deleting it only to rewrite it and delete it again. That’s the first step. And then I’ll take another step. And another. I’m not sure what those steps are going to be yet, but I do know the direction. Forward.