Failure

I often feel like a failure.  No amount of outward success impacts the core feeling that, though I accomplish many of my goals, I fail at being human.  I feel too much.  I am too sensitive.  I am too excited about the simple moments and too afraid of the complex ones.  I am everything too much, and that too much, in my mind, makes me not enough.  No one would want who I really am, messy and imperfect, a person in process, still growing.  Mockery and rejection of my idiosyncrasies, both beautiful and challenging, taught me that who I am could not be wanted or loved.  I learned to hide behind an overwhelming wall of perfectionism, and yet, the attainment of “perfect” eluded my continual attempts to reach it.  Failure.  Day after day.  Year after year.  Too much and not enough.

Recently, I filled out an application to volunteer with one of my children’s extracurricular groups.  The nature of this application required a list of skills in which I am competent.  As I proofread what I had written, I felt surprised at the appearance of order and accomplishment.  If I had read the list without knowing it was mine, I would have seen this paper as evidence of success.  But, in the process of attaining these skills, I did not feel successful.  I felt like a failure.  My process did not follow a straight path.  For example, the list says I previously held a certification for open waterfront lifeguarding.  It does not describe that I needed three attempts to pass the prerequisite distance swim, and that I had panic attacks in the water during my first two attempts that left me hyperventilating with tears streaming down my face on the side of a pool feeling humiliated in front of a group of strangers.  Is this failure?  I certainly interpreted the experience that way.  No one else cried on the side of the pool.  Everyone else swam.  What was wrong with me?

I would not judge anyone else by looking at only the middle of their story, but I do tend to judge myself from that perspective.  I see success for myself as absence of a process.  I think being a beginner at something new indicates something I should have already known how to do.  But, why is the middle such a bad place?   It takes courage to try something new, to do something with no guarantee of success.  Why not celebrate that?  Celebrate the courage to be willing to fail.  That IS success. 

What about the end of the story?  My interpretation of failure in the lifeguard story does not include the end.  I do not remember the instructor’s name who went out with me alone for the third time and told me she believed I could complete that swim.  This person granted me patience and compassion, and her gift has been one that I have passed on to many others.  Her belief in my ability to conquer some murky lake water helped me find my own strength, and I learned not only what perseverance looked like, but also that it existed within me. 

Maybe, it is okay to be a learner and to embrace a messy and imperfect process.  Maybe, it is okay to feel scared, to feel uncertain, and to try.  Maybe, it is okay that not all attempts lead to “the” outcome, and to acknowledge that all attempts lead to an outcome.  Maybe, it is okay to travel side roads and not only the highway.  Sometimes, travelling the side roads leads to unexpected, beautiful places.  So, if we define success only by reaching a single outcome, then, we miss out on the richness of what could be, what might be, and what may be.  Success lives in the process, the adventure.  Failure misses the opportunity to try. 

Though I do not hold the blueprint to what makes a successful human, I do hold the knowledge of what makes me, me.  Maybe, authenticity and self-acceptance rather than perfectionism lead to a healthier view of, not only success, but also the journey that allows me to grow into more and more of myself.   Perhaps that is all that is asked of any of us, not to force who we are into some kind of predefined box of human acceptability, but rather to become and embrace exactly who we uniquely are, enough and just-right.