I am eight years old and afraid of everything, including: large spiders, honey bees, okra, Gregorian chants, fat Turkish ladies, cemeteries, ghosts, train tracks, old people, reptiles, heights, the Fraggle Rock muppets, creaky stairs, nighttime, the BFG, and death. I’m deathly afraid of dying.
I’m enrolled in a kiddie swimming class, which I attend every week, very reluctantly — because I’m afraid of water, too. I’m also not too crazy about my teacher who makes me do stuff I’d rather not do, unnatural stuff like tread water and float on my back. In regular school, I’m learning about Jacques Cousteau and his various underwater adventures, and when my dad quips that maybe I’ll become a famous marine explorer too, he and my mom double over with laughter.
I don’t find it so funny.
One day, my swimming teacher announces we’ll learn to dive. She makes us scale this ladder to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro and I watch my fearless classmates cheerfully launch themselves off the summit, plummeting to their certain deaths. I have a clear memory of being up there in my Speedo, my knobby knees chattering, my hair in a wet, heavy braid against my back. I remember trembling at the edge of that diving board, and shouting down at my teacher that I “can’t do it, no way, no how.”
“Yes you can do it, Hilal! You have to do it. You don’t have a choice.”
Oh, but I do have a choice and that is to squat at the end of the board — white knuckled, my toes curling over the edge — and cry, the older boys in the water below, pointing up at me and laughing, the people behind me in line, complaining about the hold-up. This is a choice, too, and it’s the one I make that day.
It’ll be years before I get anywhere near a diving board again.
No one likes a quitter, that’s what they say, isn’t it? Well, no one likes a scaredy cat, either. This is what I’ve been thinking about lately: about fear, and failure; about the times where we take the leap, and others when we don’t.
We all fail. It sucks royally, but that’s how it is. There are risks we take, with our hearts, with our money: entrepreneurial risks, creative ones, and sometimes they just don’t work out. I fail regularly. I’ve written about this here before, about how I have four failed “novel” manuscripts sitting in my closet. They make me sad if I think about them, so I try not to think about them. I think experts call this “coping.” Sometimes they spell it: d-e-n-i-a-l. Either way, I guess.
The first sucky story I wrote didn’t just disappoint me, it nearly ruined me. I had my hopes pinned so firmly to this thing, but no matter how I tried to tell the story, how I tried to fix it, bandage it up, it refused to become something worthwhile, refused to be resuscitated. It was dead on arrival, and there was nothing to be done but sit in the shame, the sadness, the boiling rage of my nonsuccess.
These days, I don’t get nearly so bent out of shape about failure. I have come to realize the part of me that feels shame at the thought of falling short isn’t me at all. It’s my ego. Remembering that helps.
Maybe you can relate. If you’ve made something, tried to love someone, launched a thing, and it didn’t pan out the way you hoped, you know how important it is to forgive yourself for it. That’s step one. Forgive, then let it go. Something I enjoy doing is writing it down on a piece of paper, and setting fire to it like a pyro, holding it over the kitchen sink for as long as I can, letting go a split second before my fingers burn. I like watching the flame eat up my words, as if making my failure vanish. It gives me permission to start again, with a clean slate. An open heart.
It reminds me that whatever I’m attempting and stumbling over, it’s temporary, and not so serious. Nothing is that serious. I shouldn’t ever be doing something for the success, the applause, for the acceptance that will come with it. I should do it to do it. For the experience. I should do it so that I might grow into someone better.
“Beautiful things of any kind are beautiful in themselves and sufficient to themselves,” writes Marcus Aurelius in Book Four of Meditations. “Praise is extraneous. The object of praise remains what it was — no better and no worse. This applies, I think, even to ‘beautiful’ things in ordinary life — physical objects, artworks. Does anything genuinely beautiful need supplementing?”
If we do things just to do them, create with an eye not on the congratulations or the fat check or contract we’ll get at the finish line, but on the sense of communion with inspiration, with artistry, even with divinity itself, that we experience along the way, then we’ll be better for it. Happier. More playful and true. When we let go of the expectations we have for ourselves, and focus instead on the work in front of us, there is a tranquility we can achieve. We become less distracted, our hearts less heavy, our pens lighter.
I was watching this thing on Truman Capote the other day, about how he never got a rejection letter in his life. Not even one. That’s very unusual. Some people are charmed like that I suppose, but most of us are not. For most of us, there will be rejection, and plenty of it. Rejection is a vital part of life. It’s actually a good thing. It’s a sign that you’re trying, launching yourself off Mt. Kilimanjaro instead of just sitting the whole thing out.
Today is Damien Chazelle’s 32nd birthday. He’s the guy who wrote and directed La La Land. He’ll probably get an Oscar for doing so, or at least a nomination. He told reporters last year that he didn’t always want to be a writer. Growing up, it was all about music until he understood the limits of his talent. “I realized one day,” he said to Vanity Fair, “I was never going to be good enough as a jazz musician.” That’s when he started writing. He took his creative drive and repurposed it, channeled it differently. He adapted. He didn’t give up completely on creating, he just tried something new.
And so can we. If there’s a lesson to Damien’s story, I think that’s it. It’s that we can always choose to do something else.
Maybe I won’t be adding another bad manuscript to the pile in the closet. Maybe I’m no so good at writing novels. Maybe the next thing I create will look very different. I have no idea what it will look like, but instead of being scared of the not-knowing, I’m actually…excited. And that’s a great place to be. It’s freeing. Exhilirating. It’s looking down at the water and having your sense of curiosity override your fear.
Matthew McConaughey was talking to a reporter at Playboy last year — a magazine I obviously only read for the excellent articles. “People bring up the romantic comedy years as though I’m another person, another actor,” he said. “It was the same car, same engine, same me. I just shifted to another gear.”
I think we all have it in us to shift. It’s when we forget that, when we get too attached to some fixed outcome, some idea of who we are “supposed” to be in the world, what we “ought to be doing,” that we suffer. I don’t want to suffer in my writing anymore. There’s no need for it. I want to trust fiercely, as I sail into the deep unknown, diving into the pool of creative possibility, that what’s down there will not only catch me but it will, with ease and magic and great, great knowing, finally release me as well.
