I posted a reflection on pancakes and failure yesterday on Facebook, hoping for personal catharsis if nothing else. I wrote about how the first pancake never turns out, but that doesn’t mean you should stop making pancakes. My emotions were definitely part disappointment in not getting an offer at a job to which I had recently applied, but surprisingly enough, were also part joy as I realized I was experiencing boldness instead of fear in the face of failure. That was a very new experience for me, a recovering failure phobe, and I needed a space to process. I think I’m supposed to turn to a journal or something to deal with that, but there was a little part of me that knew that this was about more than my own healing. There were other people who needed to hear those words.
I’ve been completely blown away by the response I have received in the last 24 hours to that post. People have sent me pictures of their own first pancakes (literal and metaphorical), texted me to share their experiences with rejection, and responded with their own confession of a fear of failure. I’m not a very emotional person, but I cried reading responses. They were so beautiful and raw, and showed so vividly the scars that perfectionism had left behind. These were people who felt alone in their experience of failure, and craved somebody who was willing to sit with them in the full, complete narrative of their life. More than anything, they made me realize the hunger that we all feel for others to make room for our failures.
We humans are spectacularly good at goofing up, and absolutely horrible at being okay with it. I’m as guilty as any in trying to cover up as quickly as possible the mess that I have in my life, and I’ve come to discover that all of this stems out of a fear of rejection. A fear that if I show my whole self to the people I care about, they won’t care anymore. Coming face to face with my own fear of failure and rejection has forced me to see the same fear in the people around me, and has given me a craving to do something to remove it. No, remove is too weak of a word. I want to completely uproot the lie that worth can be so narrowly defined by acceptance letters, job descriptions, the opinion of others, and every other traditional measure of success that we so easily parade in front of each other. I think that’s what this blog is meant to be here for.
I’m entering a time in my life when I fully expect to have many many failures in close succession, and I want to share those with you. I’m going to be graduating from college in a short ten months, and after that, I have literally no clue what my life is going to look like. Given the trajectory of my life thus far, though, I’m guessing that I am going to mess up a ton along the way. I’m going to apply to graduate schools that won’t accept me and jobs where the person reading my application actually laughs at how absurdly underwhelming it is. I’m going to take classes that are way beyond me and make goals I know well I don’t have the capacity to fulfill. I cannot promise I will do it unflinchingly, but I can promise I will do it boldly.
This blog is, in its own little way, exposure therapy for my fear of failure. I want to fully share with you the failures I will inevitably experience in the coming year, the frustration and disappointment I feel as a result, and I hope, the growth I undergo as a result of stretching myself out of my safe, successful little comfort zone. I want you to know without a doubt that you are not alone in your failures, that I’m here too, and somehow, someway, we’re gonna make it through this.
The First Pancake 