I haven't written an awful lot here because, like everything else I'd like to do, it reeks of the potential for failure. What if I don't say exactly what I want to say? What if I end up pissing someone off? What if I sound really stupid, naïve, or worst of all boring? How in the world am I supposed to make a blog post that's interesting or relevant when there are so many blogs out there who say what I could say better, more frequently, with better eloquence? What's the point in trying if you know going in that you're going to be bad at it?
This line of thinking has paralyzed me for years now. A brief list of all the projects that my fear of failure has derailed: restarting my college career, writing anything of any sort – including blog entries, poems, short stories, novels, plays, you name it – that is meant to be read by anyone but myself, learning how to drive, getting a car, learning Linux, learning how to play my clarinet, learning PostGres SQL, meditating, exercising, talking about Buddhism, becoming vegetarian (that's an entirely different post), and a few other things I won't mention in greater detail here. It's quite a long list. And the pressure of clearing some things off of that list has really started getting to me recently.
At the end of this week, I'll be leaving my twenties behind and stepping into the brave new world of 30. This is the age where my experiences, vast and varied as they are, start to take shape. This is where the first, tender roots begin setting down. This is where I start the work of maturing the potential that I've used. This is where I leave the rootlessness of childhood behind, where I start to blossom into the man I'm supposed to be. But just what sort of man is that?
So far, it looks like I'm a man who doesn't do much of anything without the assurance that it's absolutely the right thing to do. That desire, as legitimate as it may have been when it started, has spiraled into this obsession, and it's getting in the way of everything else. The fear of being wrong, of failing, defines me more than any other thing I've done in my life.
What do I do about that? I'm nearly thirty years old. Is it too late to change that impulse to fold under the pressure of possible mistakes? If not, how in the world can I do it? What will it take for me to break this block and get on with the business of realizing my potential?
To answer this I had to think of the last time I thought of myself as 'successful'. That, my friends, was in middle school. I was a straight A student, had been throughout my entire young life. I was smart enough but not well-off enough to go to middle school, and I was a year ahead of everyone else my age. Not a bad feat for some little inner-city punk kid. What distinguished me from my child-self isn't the level of intelligence or anything like that – it's my ability to shrug off failure, learn from it quickly and move on to the next attempt, the one that might possibly be more successful. I kept trying until I got it done. What I remember most about being a kid was being excited by anything new, by finding ways around limitations. It was the belief that if I worked enough, I could do anything I set my mind to. The erasers ran down on my pencils far more quickly than the lead ever did.
I think the key to becoming a better person, of busting through the fear that's been keeping me from doing what I know I can do, is demystifying failure. Over time, as I got older and the stakes of my activities grew higher (standardized tests aren't too bad when you're in elementary school, but in high school you're trained to think of them as life-defining), the specter of failure grew accordingly. It went from an annoyance, to a setback, to something that was not an option. I think most of us operate in that mindset, where failure is not something inevitable but also easily navigable, but something to be avoided at all costs. It keeps us within the areas that we know well and have less of a chance of slipping up. It makes us afraid of what's new.
Well fuck that. I totally understand that failure is scary, and that in some cases the consequences of it can be pretty bad, but far more often than not it's never as awful as we fear. It's time for me to stop avoiding failure; my mission for the next little bit is to make friends with it, to get to know it, to discover the shape of it so I can see my way around it. I'm not a kid any more. Things aren't going to come naturally to me the way they once did. That means a lot more work, a lot more experiments that don't work, and hopefully – eventually – a lot more pleasure from success.
As I stand on the increasingly narrow ledge of my twenties, I vow to make my thirties more fruitful. And I know that means making a lot of shit that doesn't do anything but stink. Sometimes that makes for fertile ground, though. I have to fail more often. I'm going to fail more often. And I'm going to treat those failures the way I did while I was young; I will own them, learn from them, and steal their power to fuel my own.
It'll start right here. In this blog that will probably suck rocks at first. But for now, it can only get better, right?
