About Failures

#3 - Surviving

I have a friend whom I love very much. She was telling me about her life. And how disappointed she was.

I found it strange because I have great admiration for what she has achieved. She has shown resilience. Showed a lot of courage to get closer to her dreams. Accomplished so much.

I thought she would have been proud of how far she'd come.
But she wasn't.

She shared with me about her failures with bitterness. She acknowledged that she had made progress, but her failures... They seemed like burdens impossible to shed.

The exchange disturbed me a little. I thought about it for a few days and I'm still thinking about it. This dichotomy between how we perceive someone and how they perceive themselves.

Humans are hard on themselves. Many of us define ourselves only by our failures. And even if they manage to achieve great things, these failures remain wounds that are difficult to live with.

I understand her, there are failures that hurt. When I went bankrupt the first time, I wanted to numb myself. It hurt so much that I preferred to pretend the pain didn't exist.

That failure felt like the end of the world. The end of the little world I'd built for myself. A dream that ends at the same time as an identity.

To invest a part of yourself in a project, only to see it fail, was to witness the death of a part of yourself. At that moment, nothing seemed to make sense. I thought life was playing a trick on me.

That it was testing my resilience and that i lost. It took me years to make peace with that failure. Today, I laugh about it. It doesn't affect me anymore. I've detached myself entirely from this one. I'm even back in business.

So, I understand that her failures that are still fresh are difficult to process.
It doesn't make sense until it does.

I could share with her my story. But it wouldn't make much sense. And it would be selfish. People in pain don't want to hear "feel good stories". All pains are processed differently and at different speeds.

There are no official "I should be over this after x amount of time" rule books.

When the pain is still raw, there's nothing more unbearable than someone coming along to minimize it. Or tell you that failure is a rite of passage to success.

It's not what we want to hear because we're suffering. Although there may be some truth in that. In many destinies, without certain "key" failures there would never have been their greatest victories. These failures were their greatest victory. It was in the pain of defeat that they found the recipe for success.

When I was at my worst. I didn't want to do anything with my life. Just breathing already seemed enough. And it was after this failure that I started writing online. Without that failure, none of these lines would have been born.

I thought about it for a long time: "Did I have to fail to get to this point?"

Even if there is sometimes a causality link between a failure and an upcoming success: I don't like that line of thinking. I don't see failure as something to be celebrated. Because it focuses only on those who have managed to emerge and rebuild.

How many of those who failed never got back on their feet? We'll never know, because they are too broken to tell their stories.

I prefer to tell myself that the most important quality is to keep trying. To focus on the vital impulse that drives us to open our eyes one more day.

Suffering can be present.
It can be intense.
Today, it may not make sense.
But tomorrow, it might.

If we give up, the story ends.
All the unconnected points will never be.

In this great adventure that is life, there are still many dots that haven't found their connection. Sometimes they torment me, but I keep hoping that if I keep trying, one day I'll be able to connect them all.

Frodo: I wish none of this had happened.

Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide.
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.