And Once Again, I Prove That Failure is Always an Option
#caregivers #caregiverstresses #mentalbreakdowns #failure
It’s the middle of 2024.
I’m not even sure how that happened, just that it did and now I’m another year older and my life isn’t appreciably better than it was last year. I’ve had another significant breakdown - last week, in fact. Dealing with the hopelessly fucked up American version of healthcare is enough to put stronger psyches than mine into freefall. I recovered better from this one, in that I didn’t need a complete break from EVERYTHING, just all the non-survival stuff. I made sure we all ate, we all slept, and we all used the appropriate toilet facilities. I put my phone on DND and hid in the family room (my room feeling too close to my mum’s room) with pharmaceutical support.
In the 1990’s, there was a show called Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel. You know, back when it and the other Discovery-ish channels (History Channel, Animal Planet… TLC was always a bit more sketchy, but they tried) were actually kinda educational? And yes, I’m bitter and old and mourn the loss of quality cable programming like a stereotypical bitter old person.
(Great show, by the way. If you can binge watch it on whatever provider of old cable shows, do so.)
The Mythbusters was a show hosted by Jamie Hynemann and Adam Savage. In the course of busting urban myths, the duo frequently had any number of problems, some occasionally explosive (missing eyebrows come immediately to mind). Eventually, this led Adam Savage to adopt the motto, “Failure is ALWAYS an option.”
It resonated with me, and I adopted it as my own PERSONAL motto as well. Except at first, I didn’t exactly use it properly. Which now brings me back to the matter at hand: Failure.
See, as often as I failed in life, I absolutely hated it. It made me angry and frustrated and deeply, deeply embarrassed. Later, it would contribute to the PTSD-like condition that’s now as part of my life as my tattoos. (Really, it’s more apt a metaphor than you think - I might be able to spend a lot of money and time and effort to get rid of it, but it wouldn’t be perfect and anyway, I’d always know it was there.)
So I used the motto as a defensive shield, to deflect any feedback (constructive or not) in an effort to spare myself from feeling the feels any more than I undoubtedly would.
Failure is not a defensive shield.
I also used it as an excuse when I gave up. Usually the giving up was ALSO to spare me from feeling the feels, as it was almost always a case of pre-emptive failure; I thought I might fail, I feared I might fail, so I gave up before I could fail and feel the feels.
Failure is not the same as giving up.
Eventually I even used it to give myself license to not even try, or to actively fuck shit up. If I was a failure, after all, why bother to try? Why not just burn the whole thing down as spectacularly as possible.
Failure is neither an excuse not to try, or permission to deliberately sabotage anything.
I used failure is always an option for so long in so many ways that it ceased to have meaning. Until I failed so big and so hard and (at the time what felt like) so irreversibly that I finally had to face the word and what it really, truly, meant.
Failure is when you make an unsuccessful attempt. It requires trying.
Failure is when you make an honest, unsuccessful attempt. It requires being honest about your result.
Failure is a beneficial thing, even when the effects of the failure are catastrophic. It informs and leads to change for the better.
All of these things actually require thinking about when wetalk about failure. It’s such a negatively-charged thing to most of us that we have a knee-jerk reaction whenever it’s so much as mentioned. I know all of the above, and I STILL struggle with the emotions that are invoked by the very word.
You can’t claim you failed if you didn’t try. You can’t claim failure when you sabotaged your own results. And failure can make you more successful if you let it. So you can’t really use failure as an excuse or a defensive shield or a license to fuck up because failure doesn’t actually work that way.
And in order to learn to understand and accept failure, you have to give yourself room to fail; to forgive yourself in advance for fucking it all up, but still give it your best go anyway.
And WHEN you fail, which will happen (if you’re honest with yourself, and understand the concept fully) your entire life in small ways to large - from the coffee you spilled on you shirt when you tried to drink it, to the major screw-up that costs you a job or a lover or a friend - you have to fight down all those negative connotations and examine your failures to learn why they happened if you ever want to have a successful result.
Of course, you may still fail to learn from your failures, or fail to change for the better, and ultimately fail in your failure. But if you’re truly failing at failure, think of it this way; you’re still mastering the process of failing; you’re honestly trying and honestly examining and one day you’ll put it all together the right way up and the right way around and you’ll succeed.
Until you fail again.
After all, Failure is Always an Option.
