How To Overcome Failure

Whether it is rejection, a sense of abandonment, or an unfulfilled expectation, we all fail in life. Sometimes we fall back to old habits and old addictions. Sometimes we let others down and fail in a relationship. Other times we fail at a job or in school. When this happens, we often beat ourselves up, telling ourselves it was our fault that we failed — that we aren’t good enough. But failure does not have anything to do with being a failure as a person. As humans, we all fail; it is inevitable. But how we perceive, approach, and handle these failures is what makes us special.

Maybe your childhood environment always condemned failure and taught you not to fail under any circumstances. Maybe your environment responded poorly to failure, pushing you to a point where you were afraid of committing mistakes. We start thinking that every small bump in the road is a huge mountain that we can never climb because we are not good enough. When we fail, we often are reminded of our past failures, of our past mistakes and we tell ourself we are have not changed at all. We have not improved, and no matter what we do, we will always continue to fail and be a failure. Thus leading to a cycle of self-blame, self-loathing and self-hatred. You were possibly even doing better before your small hiccup. You were enjoying life and everything was seeming to go well. Yet one tiny setback put you back in the same cycle: doubting your very own worth and distrusting those around you. We may push away the ones close to us or we may lash out in anger at the same people who are trying to support us. You have returned to your reality, the one where you believed you were not enough: the same reality of your past, the same reality of you not being good enough in the past. You think to yourself no matter how hard you try, you will always get let down and fail.

But how about, for once, you try to take a step back and approach the failure differently. Why do you think you failed? Why do you think you are a failure? It may be because you were taught that failure and mistakes make you less of a person. Why are we so insistent that we are failures when we were never given the right tools to succeed in every way possible? We are prone to failure and we cannot avoid it. What we can do is change the way we look at failure. How are supposed to live a perfect life when we assume it is purely our responsibility to lead that perfect life without enough information or tools or the perfect support system to allow us to lead such a life? Our education system does not teach us anything about emotional development and the books that we read don’t tell us much either. Our parents were imperfect humans as well who made mistakes while raising us possibly not giving us the right amount of affection or love. Our sciences have not reached the extent to recognize the emotional processes of our mind. So how are we supposed to know how to navigate the absurd world without any blemishes?

There are two ways to approach the issue of failure: we can either blame ourselves and go back into the vicious cycle of self-blame and self-hatred because that is what our environment told us growing up. Or we can take a step back and look at the absurd nature of our need to be good enough. Why not try a new thing this time and use the latter method? We should look at these failings ironically as we humans are all fallible. We all fuck up immensely and we are messes within ourselves. So instead of looking at a failure as a reason not to live, as a reason of not being good enough, we should look at it as a sign of improving ourselves. We should recreate the failure as a story of success, changing the narrative to understanding. By saying: “Of course no one else would commit the same exact mistakes as us since no one else also had the same exact childhood or the same exact flaws and weaknesses as us.” Yes, we all have horrible weaknesses and these weaknesses are what make us human and make us unique.

So next time, instead of beating yourself up, look at failure from a different light. Rather than indicating you are unworthy of life, failure is just a minuscule mishap in a long lifetime of learning and improving. Failure allows us to understand ourselves and improve ourselves. Without mistakes, we are unable to connect with others. With failures, we can create meaningful relationships by sharing our vulnerabilities from a positive perspective.