Fear of Failure
It’s a complete surprise to me that I am afraid of failure. I have failed at nearly everything I’ve attempted in my life — relationships, careers, parenthood. I’ve even failed at being a dog owner and gardener. Happily, I also failed at suicide, twice.
But here I am on the other side of that experience and still I find myself in fear.
Every day is a choice, I say, to act from a place of love and gratitude or from fear.
This is my mantra. What keeps me going and gives me purpose in life. After all that searching and struggling, I’ve finally found my purpose — to simply love. And, yet, I’m afraid.
Fear is an unrelenting force.
Early mornings are sacred to me. I prefer to wake before all others and to sit with my coffee. It’s better if I can be outside, but the rocking chair in my kitchen works quite well if it’s cold or wet. I like that hazy morning light, filtered and fuzzy through just opened eyes, and the stillness.
Even in cities, where nothing ever stops, early morning is nonetheless a dramatic shift from seemingly eternal chaos to a semblance of peace.
Yesterday morning, I woke before the sun. I sat and sipped. The coffee was hot and mild, the way I like my morning brew to be. I had a blanket wrapped around my legs; the wet chill of the night still hung in the dawn.
As I usually do, I let my thoughts flow. I checked my email, scrolled a bit through Facebook, read an article or two. This is how it works, for me. Only once my mind has been aroused, my curiosity awake, can think productively about my day.
I like to get down to brass tacks as others are just waking: I prioritize needs, both others and my own. I check the weather.
On good days, days like yesterday, I get to write or design alone for a few hours before attending to anything else.
When this works — when the flow is there and I am confident that I’m not forgetting or neglecting anything or one — it is magic.
The words come from somewhere beyond me. Ideas flow. My mind is still all over the map — I am who I am, after all — but I feel like I’m doing what I’m meant to do. And, yet, I’m afraid.
Fear is an unrelenting force.
Perhaps it starts with an email, from LinkedIn or a job board, alerting me to fact that the real world is still out there. A world I left. A world in which I said I could no longer survive. The nine-to-five that turns into the 24/7, the robotic towing of the “company line”, excessive paperwork and deadlines, playing nice with bullies and power-hungry lunatics.
I did not burn out as a counselor, I burned out as a cog in the machine, trying to fit within dysfunctional systems that do little more than undermine their stated purpose.
Other times, the fear will come from uncertainty — of economics, of the future, of my own abilities.
I am afraid that I am not disciplined enough, that I don’t work hard enough or that I can’t. When faced with the reality that I do work hard every single day, no matter what, I begin to think that I don’t have any talents, just grit.
People are just being nice when they compliment me or throw me a project or gig, I think. And, in the back of my mind, there is always that one friend who said I was hiding — from my true life, my potential — by mowing grass and painting houses.
Regardless from whence it came, the fear took hold the other day. Yesterday. And, now I know why I was so miserable.
When I opened my laptop his morning and saw the job sites, the credentialing information and the websites of institutions where I’d long ago hung up my hat, I almost gasped.
I had been flush with creative energy — clearly evidenced by some of the writing and work I had done — but in the end, as I was nearly the end of my alone time,
all my creativity got lost in the marsh of what I should do or could do or even would do to better conform to society.
I was acting from a place of scarcity. But, for good reason.
My business lost 15K in the first year. All of that was my own money; I couldn’t bring myself to take on investors until I knew for sure that this would work.
I am oft critiqued for calling myself a “wage slave” these days, but I have never been happier — doing what I’m doing, sometimes for money and sometimes not. I call myself a wage slave because I spent the better part of 20 years working two or three jobs just to have this chance to fail. And, I’m really afraid sometimes.
Fear is relentless force.
It is a commonly held rule that it takes a restaurant or a store about 3 years to turn a profit. Why do our expectations differ when we are selling ourselves and our ideas?
Perhaps because of just this — because the fear has kept us from leaping, from putting all our eggs our own basket and saying to the universe: guide me and direct me. I just want to do good.
If we act from a place of love, for ourselves as well as others, fear would have no power.
Of this I am sure — in my heart, but not always my mind. And, it’s my mind that opens that laptop in the mornings.
It’s my mind that says that my organization is silly and that I am being idealistic; that I should listen to my mother, give up and get a real job again. The hustle is too much. I don’t have enough — resources, time or skill.
But, my heart knows, and more importantly, my experience has shown,
if we give ourselves the chance to try and to potentially fail, each one of us can change the world in a positive way.
