Failure, come to me

Felipe Acosta
Nov 1 · 3 min read
Photo by iSAW Company from Pexels

Ever since I have been a kid, I’ve had a complex relationship with failure. I don’t know exactly how it came about, but I believe it might have something to do with the fact that in my infancy I had a sort-of disconnection from my parents affection. Since I learned to speak and do lots of things from a very early age, I was constantly compared to other kids, and praised to the extent that I did better than them. Affection was conditioned to my performance in a variety of scenarios. Thinking back on it, it makes a lot of sense what happened next.

I have had a paralyzing fear of failure from as far as I can remember, and I tend to look for evidence that supports that I am on the verge of failing at life or that I have achieved little, although those two could be understood to be one and the same. Despite being 17 years old, I can recall lots of times thinking that “I have fucked my life up” or “set myself to failure” beyond repair. Why might this be? Well, poor management of my psyche, I’d say. Little need to matter now but how to fix this, yet the idea that I need a fix has its intricacies.

So much of who I am today can be explained as a direct consequence of this irrational fear of failure I carry, and I wonder: how much of my identity could be lost were I to completely change that from me and, if it’s so engrained, is it even possible? Always fearing failure, has the effect of making you achieve lots of things but without feeling good or accomplished about it. Notwithstanding the latter, achieving lots of things can be understood to be a good thing, and in a way this has pushed me to always be better. A funny example about this is my self-awareness. Since I am more self-aware than most people — and I have to thank this fear of failure for it — , I know that this fear is something I ought to change and get better at, so in a way my irrationally self-demanding nature carried the seed of it’s own demise.

What does it mean to get better at this? That is an interesting question I’ve asked myself lots of times. I think there’s no straight answer, but I do think that there needn’t be one. Increasing one’s wellbeing shouldn’t be conditioned by one’s future ability to remain as productive; being well relates to the buoyancy of a boat, while productivity relates to its speed. A sinking ship is doomed, regardless of its speed — or anything else for that matter.

The ways by which to get better at this are twofold; better habits (e.g. reading, exercising, mindfulness, better diet) and focused actions, which refer to things like introspection, and therapy.

I believe that the most crucial point up to this point has been gaining knowledge about this dynamic within me and its origin, but as they say, what took from A to B, ain’t gonna take you from B to C. Recently, I have been aroused (not sexually) by the idea of seeking failure. I think this would be healthy as a bit of exposure therapy (subjecting myself to situations where failing feels safe and low-stake and slowly try to feel okay with real-life sized failures), but also very useful as a thought exercise.

Despite always being aware of failure and thinking about it, I have very seldom engages into truly entertaining what would actually happen if I fail. What if I fail, big? Not failing at something specifically, but burning every bridge. What’s the absolute worse that it could get? Entertaining and thinking about this is very hard and also feels wrong or even dirty, nonetheless once you do, you realize that the worst things that could happen most often, is not much, and to make it truly bad, you have to try really hard at it.

The most concisely I can put this, is that there’s not condition to go beyond deserving acceptance from yourself. There’s no minimum threshold of achievements one needs to pass in order to deserve acceptance from oneself, and what that means for my life, is set to be very disruptive.

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