Casting Fear Away As ‘Riddikulus’
/ˈfālyər/
noun
1. Lack of success
“With another rejection in her email, Brooke felt as if she was doomed to failure.”
2. The omission of expected or required action.
“Brooke’s failure to attain a job was very disappointing to her family.”
These are the textbook definitions of failure, and these are my real life examples that make me feel like a failure.
Failure has always been my greatest fear. Not spiders, heights, or clowns but the idea of public failure kept me up at night. This intangible thing that took the shape of a hundred different scenarios throughout my life. The prospect of failing a class, (a reality when you suck at math in high school), failing to get into the college that you want (a reality when you’re put on the wait list for your top choice), failure in relationships (don’t get me started), and failing to get through an undergraduate program that you thought you wanted (is it what I wanted?)
I think that is the most intimidating thing about failure. It doesn’t stay in one form, but manages to shape shift based on your insecurities that follow you. It’s the real life boggart from Harry Potter, and no matter how “riddikulus” it seems, I can’t get away from it. Until this point of my life I’ve been able to narrowly escape failure in the forms I’ve encountered. I graduated from high school with decent enough marks to get into a few colleges, and eventually I graduated from my university with the highest honors.
I’ve always been very good at doing what is expected from me, and this is applied to all aspects of my life. For people with certain privileges, there is a well worn path that is pretty easy to follow. You go through school, and there will be challenges along the way, but there is no mystery to it. All the expectations and guidelines have been cemented through time, and now it’s your turn to get through it.
My dad always says that the first day of a class is the most difficult because you’re given a syllabus of everything that you are going to have to accomplish, and it’s overwhelming. But life outside of the classroom has proved to be more challenging to traverse. I think the first time I truly did something that fell into the category of, “omission of expected” was when I declined to apply to graduate school.
It was the obvious next step, but this time around I couldn’t seem to push myself to climb any farther. For awhile, I remained optimistic. I had a fantastic summer where I got to travel and I felt more alive and independent than I ever had before; then I moved back home. And with home came a crushing feeling that fell into definition number one of failure, “a lack of success.”
Specifically, I was lacking a job despite hundreds of applications I sent. I was lacking friends because they were either in grad school, med school or had jobs that they moved for. I was lacking purpose because I felt useless and alone. For the the first time in my life there was no expectation or required action to take. I mean, eventually I expected to get some sort of job if I kept applying, but there was no professor or supervisor that was calling out the shots.
I have fallen into my very nightmare of what failure looked like. I’m out of college, but living at home with no job, internship, or school program. The worst thing that I thought could happen has happened, so now what? My answer: this is nothing. My greatest fear has happened and even though there have been tears and dark days, I’ve learned to live with failure.
The key is to continue making decisions even after failure has fallen on your head like an anvil in a cartoon. There have been stretches of time when I have let failure debilitate me from taking action, and I think that is the greatest tragedy of all. What I try and do now is go to bed every night and think about the kind of day I want to have tomorrow. I think about the kind of things I can work on that will put me into closer contact with the dreams and desires I have, and then I wake up and try to do those things to the best of my ability.
I’m still scared as hell about the prospect of failing again. Scared that I will never move out of my parent’s house, that I’ll always be a bad writer, and that I’ll never be able to get accepted into a master’s program. But I have to keep making decisions, and when those decisions become challenging I remember something: this is nothing.
