Dealing with Perceived Failure
A Testimony
*Originally published on October 29, 2014 by the online magazine In Earnest*
You started the year with so much going for you, or so you thought. You moved back to your beloved city on a humid August day to a beautiful loft apartment with three lovely friends. You were excited to reconnect with classmates you had not seen for three months and impress the freshmen with your seniority. You couldn’t wait to spread the good news: in a week you would start an internship with a small literary agency, an internship you’d acquired all by yourself, no connections in hand, and one that would propel you forward in your career path of choice. Imagine it: graduating from college in New York City with a seamless transition to adult life, to working at a publishing house as an assistant to the editor, or some job like it that would be fulfilling and would pay the bills. Impressive to family and friends alike. Distracting them from the fact that you are not dating, which means you are not getting married anytime soon, as they expect you to.
In fact, you’d thought you might start dating this year. Your stomach turned as you envisioned your first encounter with him since May. But, in reality, that encounter left something to be desired, which you later find out from a third party is due to the fact that this young man is now attached to someone else. It’s ok, though, it’s fine—you still have your internship. That’s an interesting point of conversation.
Three weeks into school and the disillusionment sets in. You realize, after a lack of sleep and an inordinate amount of stress, you don’t like your internship. What if being an editor isn’t something you want to do after all? You feel the need to justify quitting to everyone you small talk with, even near strangers. “What are you doing this year, besides school? They ask. “Well,” you say, “I had this internship…”
But there is one last hope for the redemption of your identity and status: the school play. The lead is female, and you’ve been encouraged by many people that you would be perfect for the part. “It requires someone of your ability and maturity,” a fellow actor said.
And that is how you come to find yourself sitting, alone, on the couch in your empty apartment on a Wednesday afternoon, silently staring into space, wondering what in the world you will do with all your free time, without an internship, a boyfriend, or a part in the school play. A senior in college, taking four classes, grading papers for a professor to pay the bills, dreading the question from peers and elders, “What are you plans for next year? What do you want to do?”
Failure, n., the state or condition of not meeting a desirable or intended objective and may be viewed as the opposite of success.
Can your failures ever be a good thing? Can they be something you can be thankful for? Can they even be something to celebrate?
You don’t want to think about the times you’ve felt like a failure. No one does. But maybe you can celebrate, in a sense remember and commemorate, the times you have failed because from it you learn more about yourself. Past failures are a catalyst for change. They can motivate you to grow, do something different, or even take you in a new direction you never thought you could go.
You failed to meet your desired objectives—get a job in publishing from your internship, start dating to avoid more awkward conversations about your singleness at Christmastime, and garner the praise of your community with your moving performance in the play—but maybe those weren’t the right objectives in the first place. Maybe better objectives are waiting for you around the corner.
It’s possible you don’t need these kinds of objectives at all. Sometimes you just need to do the work put in front of you. You need to be, exist, without relying on other people or things to give you meaning or purpose.
Even though you are stripped of the things you thought you were, you begin to feel a sense of freedom, even excitement, about what lies ahead.