I’ve been thinking a lot about failure and flops lately.
I am no longer in a season where I feel like I am failing myself which means I can now view the story I told myself about my failures over the last couple of years objectively. Honestly, reviewing those stories is making me want to create new world views around how I speak to myself and speak about myself when I am in what I previously referred to as a “flop era.”
From 2021-some parts of 2023 I felt like I was living through my “flop era” because my expectations of myself were not matching with the reality of my life. 2020 had blown up spectacularly the life I had worked so hard to build and finally feel settled in. In 2021 I had to pick up all the pieces, sort through the rubble, wade through the concurrent griefs, and wait until it felt safe to re-build again on a different foundation. It was extremely heartbreaking to watch a lot of things slip through my fingers, to attempt to build pre-maturely and watch the new things crumble. And in response to the heartbreak I slowly began to internalize the failure as a “me problem.” Surely something had to be wrong with me. I had lost my sparkle and my edge and I had concrete evidence of my failures reminding me daily that everything I touched crumbled.
During one of my teary conversations with my therapist she asked me to embrace and stop running from the feeling of drowning. She asked me to be curious about what was in the room with me. To stop exhausting and just be present for the lessons in the dark. Turns out that was the exact remedy I needed for that moment. My post therapy journal note from that session said:
I cried so much in therapy today. The analogy she gave me is that I’m in this dark hole. I’ve been trying so hard to get out but it’s not working. What if I just consented to being here. Stopped fighting it and just started being curious about what is here. Maybe I can view dark space as a cocoon.
Which is exactly what I did. I learned to befriend the void. And in it I found a teacher. The reasons for my limiting beliefs and fears were revealed to me with such tenderness. And I had the space to tend to the parts of me that had created these beliefs and stories in the first place.
I learned to stop categorizing my life by wins & flops, to stop measuring my worth and value by my output. I traded my perfectionistic lens for a kinder lens that allowed me to see myself as a human person with a multi-dimensional life.
I learned that losing is just as important as winning. Both are very vulnerable states that just provide information about a plethora of things. I learned that if I am failing at something, the only things I need to re-evaluate are the plan, the process, and the timing. My self worth is never up for re-evaluation based on the circumstances of my life.
I learned how to believe my affirmations. To go to the root of my feelings of unworthiness and tend to it at the root. I got a tattoo as a covenant to myself that I won’t let myself forget just how wonderful I am.
I learned how to build true community, not just a network. Surrounded myself with people who love me for me. People who I felt comfortable being vulnerable with in real time and knowing it would not shift their love, care, or respect of me.
Now that I am in a very different place and reflecting back on this time, its almost comical how much I felt like I was stuck because in actually I was growing deeply. I was just unable to see the value in that sort of transformation because of the ways I had been conditioned by capitalism to only see growth as something I could immediately quantify and track.
And so my invitation to you is this…what if we held our perceived failures and flops as information? What if we understood it as data solely about the journey? Rather than attaching our self worth, projecting our limiting beliefs, and our deeply held stories of unworthiness onto them? What if we let life unfold and see what lessons lie waiting for us in hindsight?