Am I Failing?

I had a very wonderful weekend, and then on Monday I went to work. It wasn’t the job itself, but the work I was making, it was terrible. Not a great feeling. To make myself feel better, I went on Instagram (my first mistake), and everyone was doing good work, but I was not. I wanted on that Monday to be taking photos, but I was retouching. I wished I were creating something, not retouching something. I wished I were an artist instead of a retoucher (which is a craft, not an art to me). I went to bed; the feeling would pass. Tuesday, I woke up, and like Groundhog Day, it started over again. I felt like I was failing.

I kept asking myself: Am I failing? I am. Which is a sort of relief in it’s on way. The pressure of success is alleviated with the relief of failing. As I write this, I am sitting at my desk failing. It’s not so bad, actually, when I really let it be. At the onset of this failure, the idea that it was all happening felt fatal. But like a flu shot at the doctor’s, it’s worse to think about than it is to actually participate in.

When we succeed in one place, we often fail somewhere else. I finished a book yesterday, but didn’t read the article I saved from New York Magazine. Failure! It’s not a revelation that is new or profound; it’s just one we sometimes come to. It’s one we forget over and over again, and relearn constantly. Maybe not you, but me and many other people are in a constant state of learning this lesson.

I don’t want to see failure at this moment, as glass half empty or full, either. The way we learn not to associate what is sometimes out of our control with negativity. The way we stopped using phrases like you lost weight as praise or gaining weight as negative, no matter the circumstances. I am learning to associate failure with nothing. Just something that is. I am not in school anymore, and I’m not being punished for failing.

What I was failing at is not as important as the failure. Though if you’re so curious, I was just at a crossroads with what I dream of doing with my life, and where I currently am. I felt a separation from those two versions of myself, and they felt farther away from each other than ever. Everything else that happened this week, the other things I considered as failures as well, just piled onto the feeling. I could have won the lottery this week, or even had a new job offer, and still, there would be this sense of failure in the air. Which is to say, most times it is just that it is April, and for some reason I always have this big freak-out in April. It’s the changing of a season, and the final stretch before I feel like I am free of the chill of winter, I suppose.

The good thing is I survived the failure. That’s what is important to me. The failure came and went, and nothing really changed other than my perception of what was to be. The failures were small in many ways. I don’t have the money for a new camera that I suddenly feel I so desperately need. That was a failure. Not realizing until now that I probably should have upgraded my camera instead of spending my money on god knows what, another failure. I wasn’t cooking a real dinner a lot, failure. I haven’t been taking enough photos. Failure. I should call my parents more because we should always call our loved ones more; that’s failure. It is a fate I regularly meet. But is it really all that bad? No, it isn’t at all. This is what I was so worked up over? The truth is yes. I became overwhelmed with a lot of accumulating failure. At the time, it felt like so much. Like an endless stream of it. But I lived to tell the tale.

I will always be failing at something, and I refuse to make myself feel better by healing the wound with my wins. My wins are great and numbered this month! But I need to be more comfortable with these failures. I need to be clear too that from the other side of the freak out, these failures aren’t very big. They are just the things that happen when life gets in the way. We get a frozen pizza, we spend money to go somewhere with friends, we mean to call our parents, but we’re playing phone tag. We are still working out how to be the person we are dreaming of being. It’s not a moral failing on my part; it’s just the cards I was dealt this week. But it felt disastrous.

When you read this, I don’t think anyone is thinking I am, as a person, a failure. I believe you’re probably thinking, I’ve been there. What I am now thinking about this failure is so what?

Life is still going! This is not the same coping mechanism as healing the wound by placing another success over it. This is acknowledging that life continues to happen. Babies are born, music still plays, the world turns. I can exist in the world with my failure, and still find beautiful things. Failure is a blip in a life full of many things. So what if one moment is a failure? The next moment is breathing. The one after that is blinking, the one after that is trying again.

My failure this week, while all-consuming, was not as big as I imagined. I wish I hadn’t let it become so much bigger than it was. I wish I could have shaken it off, but I couldn’t. That is the way it is sometimes. Regardless of whether this failure turns into something good or not, I am okay with the fact that I was, for a small blip in time, failing at a handful of things. If I could in any way hold them in my hands and see them, it wouldn’t be much of anything. Like grains of sand in the cosmic universe of my life. I only mean to tell you this because I have spent so much time thinking of failure as an orbiting being, or a stain on a white t-shirt, but it’s really just something else entirely. It’s just there, and then it is gone. A fleeting moment in a laundry list of things that happen every day. While it’s good to acknowledge it, I think next time, I might not take it so personally.

In an effort to keep snail mail not exclusive, here are some digital files of what was sent out to everyone who pays for a tangible version of my newsletter! It was written before I went to Italy which was causing me some grief so it is slightly outside of my typical writing in some way which is always a good thing.

See you next month, but hopefully sooner.