Losers as Winners
Succeeding at defeat
We all have been there. Failure stroke every one of us, be it in jobs, careers, friendships, relationships, money, family, etc. Failure can stripe us of many things, and along the way, our sense of self becomes more vulnerable and weaker, forever condemning us to retreat to an internal hut where we wouldn’t have to deal with the consequences of such a tragedy.
The modern world has barely served us. Ever since the dawn of the internet in the nineties, we can acknowledge that people have never been more depressed or prone to catastrophes, whether imaginative or actual. It seems as though the age of social media has messed up with our minds enough to consider almost anything that appears lesser than expected, to be a definite failure.
We are taught so much about how to succeed; almost every other self-help book aims to provide advice and lessons on becoming more prosperous, more efficient, more productive, and developing healthy habits with the promise of success in life. No one wishes to speak about the less (or more) likely outcome, the collapse of our carefully elaborate goals and plans.
It is definitely not easy to deal with real letdowns, such as bankruptcy, sex scandals, divorce, and health degradation. While these things have their root causes and often an action plan is set in place to deal with the situation, however difficult it can be, it is not these kinds of failures that scare me the most.
We wake up wondering about “what ifs,” what if our relationship falls apart, what if we lose our job, what if our friends betray us, what if we lose our hair. We continue to live miserably in the shadows of these hypothetical situations for no good reason. It is the failure of what might occur or the fear of it that can genuinely be nightmarish enough to make us believe that our lives may no longer be worth living.
Often there could be an actual danger. We could have issues in our marriage or a dilemma at the prospect of a new job change. We might be scared, but the fear of failure can be so crippling that we overblow the danger associated with it out of proportion.
Social media has made it easy for us to constantly compare ourselves to others and feel like we’re a worse version of ourselves than we should be. At a tap of a finger, we know who’s doing better, and we feel lethargic as though we are missing out on a whole other life, as though we have failed ourselves. And it happens to be addictive; we are consistently on the lookout to be competitive. This is related to the dopamine effect in our brain that influences our mood and feelings of reward and motivation. On one side of the equation, we want to feel better, we desire to be more goal-oriented, yet on the other side, we fail to see ourselves in a better light. The contrast becomes more apparent: we are motivated by emotions of defeat that reward us with nothing but desperation and misery.
Imagined failures can feel as intense as actual failures, if not even worse because we are not self-aware enough to understand what is happening most of the time. We pledge the arising feelings as though they are real. However, we often realize that the worst-case scenario does not occur and that we worry too much about an event that was purely invented by our overly anxious brains.
So how to deal with this fear of failure?
From the book “On Failure” written by my favorite authors from “The School of Life”, come a few interesting insights and tips:
Soothing
We may be unable to soothe ourselves similarly to how our parents used to when we were toddlers, or we may have never been gifted with pacifying parents in the first place.
“We are not wicked or dumb, we simply never learned how to calm ourselves down, because long ago, no one else knew how to calm us down.”
Upon this realization, we may want to begin decades later to learn how to be our own pacifiers.
Self-hatred
Many of our concerns are ways of beating ourselves up and doubting whether we are worthy of anything good. If we don’t love ourselves enough, we might find it challenging to enjoy a relaxing holiday or a seemingly healthy relationship. There may not be a lurking danger behind our worries but rather a question of why we can’t be kinder to ourselves. We need to address our feelings of unworthiness rather than seek assurance for our panic.
Trauma
A lot of the events happening around us seem terrifying because, at some level, we have not adequately dealt with the original cause and circumstance that led us to assume awfulness in almost any situation that ignites memories of that past event. By understanding the source of a distant crippling event through our rational minds, we will be able to have less fearful memories and perhaps deem the world to be less scary.
Money
A strong desire for wealth is often generated by experiences of unmanageable disappointments in early life. Money becomes a compensatory mechanism in the event of an emotional loss where it promises the end of self-doubt and misery. Though wealth offers its endless pleasures, it shouldn’t be mistaken for a route to safety and emotional stability. Most certainly, when we are wealthy, we are even more stressed and anxious than ever because we did not adequately treat the original problem behind why we sought money so hard in the first place. We must find, in this case, emotional retribution through a genuine treasure: people who can love us for who we are.
Imposter syndrome
We may come from a background where we were taught that we are unworthy of success, that nothing we ever did was enough. If success indeed comes our way, we may think that those who helped shape our destiny must have been mistaken somehow because we do not deserve to win. We then may start to deliberately sabotage our lives by failing at our job or cheating on our partners to achieve a self-fulfilling prophecy. We need to go back in the past and accept that perhaps we never learned that we were enough, that we don’t need to be flawless or perfect to deserve to succeed. We need to actively be kind and tell ourselves that we don’t need to live up to outstanding expectations that no human being can meet to be loved and cared for.
The benefits of a breakdown
The idea of failing can be so dreadful that we try to escape every living moment by surrounding ourselves with fake friends, working relentlessly to earn more money, and filling every minute of the day with mindless activities. We are constantly racing against this seemingly inevitable destination: failure. And it’s very exhausting. At some point, we may say enough; we won’t get out of bed, stop caring what people are saying, quit our lousy job, and leave that toxic partner. And it would look like the world has ended to everybody else around us.
This can be very frightening, but it’s not necessarily bad. We start longing for failure in such a situation because it provides us with the ability to
“clear out the false gods we have been worshipping for so long”
and align with our true selves for once. This is what we need for a breakthrough that can allow us a deeper understanding of our spirits and a quieter sort of success in other areas of our lives that we have long forgotten.
Paranoia
Most of us have been raised not to express our rage or sadness; we couldn’t complain in front of a mad and agitated father, and we didn’t dare to speak when kids around us bullied us at school. We were so frightened that people would leave us if we expressed ourselves properly. So we repressed rage at other people and redirected it against ourselves. We don’t dare to whine because we don’t understand what is happening in our system, circulating toxic and quelled feelings. We can’t confront our boss, partner, or friend because, in our early years, a parent could not take the slightest expression of frustration. We are scared of being left behind and alone.
If we find ourselves now growing more fearful of particular people or dynamics, we need to dwell on that forever hidden part of us that was at some point very angry with people and couldn’t express herself. Understanding our paranoia will make us feel much safer and realize that we have the right to complain, and people won’t harm us if we dare to speak with decency and politeness.
Not thinking straight
Our capacity for intelligence is highly affected by our emotional responses. Powers of reason can fail us under particular situations, especially if we suspect danger, bankruptcy, abandonment, and disgrace. We do ourselves a huge favor in these moments if we imagine that we are not in any danger, but instead, we have stopped thinking straight. This too, shall pass. We are not intrinsically stupid, but we have regressed to our earlier stages in life where all we did as children was panic and scream at the slightest inconvenience, awaiting solace and consolation from a higher figure.
We need to understand that our minds are sometimes susceptible to faulty readings because our emotional zones have blown out of proportion. There is no boogeyman under our beds, no tiger in the room, and we will not die. Our capacity to cognitively assess and grasp the danger is simply halted for a while and needs some help.
Self-compassion
Our character may be reluctant to take our side by nature. When we were young, we were constantly let down and shouted at by people who experienced the same fears and failures as we do now, and we were not allowed to get annoyed back. We grew afraid of failure because we were not loved in a well-deserved way, and we were not accepted unconditionally. We were too occupied working trying to impress and fend off imagined enemies.
But now, we can sit quietly with ourselves and try to be a loving parent to the critical inner voice in our heads, the way we always wanted to be loved. We can applaud ourselves for how hard we’ve tried, for the long way we’ve come. We now have the chance to reorient our lives towards a kinder and warmer reign of safety by altering how we perceive ourselves and congratulate ourselves on all our efforts. That inner voice inside us, our worst enemy perhaps, deserves the kindest words because he never properly learned how to be loved and reassured.
A less pressured life
Our behaviors need to actively mimic the kind of life we deserve. We need lots of sleep, moments where we do absolutely nothing other than process time and reflect. We should seek to dial down the usage of media — which can drive us insane — be in nature, and have endless walks amid trees, lakes, and sunshine. We need to surround ourselves with genuine friends and allies who would offer support no matter how dark our lives get. We can finally retire from an elite life to decrease the associated paranoia and madness. We ought to understand that we cannot have everything in life at the expense of our peace of mind and serenity.
In summary, surrendering to the fear of failure is key to sometimes understanding that whatever severely awful scenario might happen, it almost always isn’t that big of a deal. Assuming that everything terrible will occur and then concentrating our energies on how it will be bearable can offer a lot of consolation to our inner turmoil. A careful examination of the worst-case scenario will lead to an unexpected conclusion: we will always survive no matter what and get through almost any disasters, whether imaginative or real. We can, after all, greet terror with a welcoming face, reassuring ourselves that no pain will be endless and no scenario won’t be surpassed by our remarkable capacity to persist and prevail, just like we did our entire lives.
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