So that phrase has been running through my head, every day, since you first said it to me...Man, it's REALLY inspirational...and not in a Hearts and Flowers, Halmarky kinda way...in more of a Nerves of Steel, Commando sort of way...you'd think it'd be scary. And maybe it would be if someone else were saying it to me, about me...but something about me saying it to myself...gotta say...I'm
lovin' it!
Now, I know...if you wanna be 100% realistic about the whole thing, I know that it's impossible to
really say that "Failure is not an option." Cause we both know that in the literal context, it is. And it's been this knowledge about the existence of this option, and our relationship with it, over our lives, that has probably done us in or held us back more than any other brain machination.
See, you and I, we've never been the sort to live a life where we experience occasional failures, as they happen...a life where we, then, lick our wounds, process our failures, learn from them and then say to ourselves ÖK, I got it now." so we can move gracefully on, into our futures...We do not "Fail and Go"! Nor do we 'Quick Fail', "Fail in the Moment', 'Fail in Perspective' or 'Fail for the Day.'. No...we
are Fail Loungers
..we like to take our
time so we can really
immerse ourselves in the subtleties of the soul-blackening, hope-guillotine that is '
The Lingering Fail'. We are also Enthusiasts, Connesuars, and Prolific Creators of
The Imaginary Fail...the Remotely Possible, In-A-Parellel-Universe, with one hand tied behind my back and the other holding a cup of Dark Matter"' Fail. Were there a market, we could have made a killing.
No Failure Too Big or Too Small For Us To Conceive Of. Unfortunately we'd be the only buyers since it's absolutely unimaginable for either of us to come up with failure for people we love...for people we love, we only have thoughts and words and deeds of encouragement and hope. For people we love, we only think of ways we can help them succeed.
But for you and I...somehow we have managed for most of our lives to fill up the brunt of our days with every possible, imagined failure we can conjure up PLUS every actual failure from our past that we've taken and magnified and amplified 100 times over...no wonder we have such a fear about failure! With a billion possible ways
to fail running through our minds, who wouldn't be fucking terrified? And no wonder we've spent so much time, in the past, in 'My Life Improvement Plan Limbo! When you have to go through all of the gazillions of mental gyrations and then suffer the ensuing emotional exhaustions...all just from conjuring up the myriad number of the ways you could
possibly fail...and you have to go through it again and again, every time you want to try and make just one, tiny new change that you feel might improve your life and bring you joy...Well, holy hell, it's a wonder we're not permanently curled up into a fetal position on the floor of the closet! Who can be expected to go out there and 'be all we can be' under these circumstances? It's ridiculous! Who has the time?
Failure is not an option? FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION? Are you frigging kidding me? Not when you take all of the possible ways I've come up with to fail in any situation, and compare them with all of the ways I've come up with to succeed! Statistically speaking, failure is not
an option, 99.99% of the time, it's the
only option. Using to my faulty logic calculations, based entirely on facts I have gathered using my miraculous ability to see into a gazillion imaginary futures, I can predict my future of failures with almost complete certainty. I'm like Nostradamus...but without all of that hopeful, rhymey, Ít All Ends Well' bullshit.
So here's the question I've been asking myself for the last several days...Have I ever, in my life, committed myself, 100% to something I really wanted, even when I wasn't 100% certain I could succeed? Especially when I wasn't 100% certain I could succeed? And the answer is...yes. Three times. I feel like I did that when I decided that I wanted to buy my house in Durham. And I feel like I have done that, am doing that, in my marriage (despite my occasional backpeddling). And I feel like I did that in my first marriage...until he cheated the first time...and then I wavered...but when it ended, part of what hurt so much was that I knew I had really tried, with all of my heart...and it failed anyway. I put my whole heart into it, which is why, when it got broken, it got broken so big. Yeah, that failure hurt. But I've been able to go into my future and love again, with the self-knowledge that I was a good wife, that I am a good wife...that I'm loyal and kind and committed to the people I love. Danny had to go into his future with shame and self-recriminations that persist to this day...he wishes he had tried harder to keep our relationship, to stop the demise of our marriage and to keep losing me from becoming what he calls now the 'biggest regret' of his life. The way you feel about yourself when you fail at something you want to accomplish, despite having done your very best...it's very different than how you end up feeling when you fail at something that you
know you held part of your self back from or that you gave up, in some way, on. If you give 100% of yourself to something, you may fail, but your failure won't feel as personal because you know that there was absolutely nothing more that you could do. But when you are half-hearted, and you fail, the failure feels personal. And it feels that way, because it is, because you
know you could have done more and for whatever reasons, you chose not to.
For those of us who spent most of our lives with untreated or undiagnosed ADD, it's all muddy water. We've already spent a lot of time feeling like we should have done more with our lives, should have done things differntly, should have been able to do what other's are so obviously able to...we spent the first parts of our lives really trying, really doing our best, despite failing, over and over again. After a while it just gets easy to stop going all in on the dreams we have for our life because we've come to believe that, for us, giving 100% or 50%...it doesn't matter... it all ends in the same place. And as the failures and missed opportunities go up, how much and how often we feel able to try, goes down. By the time we get diagnosed and get medicated, we've grown accustomed to our lack of hope. We've all but forgotten, if we ever realized at all, how much strength and determination we actually possess. Most of the time we never saw, beyond the fact that we failed, how much courage it has always taken for us to continue to try, over and over again, as well. So when I said, earlier that I had only given myself to things 100%, three times in my life, that's not actually true. I've done my best hundreds of times...it's just that for many of those times, I didn't succeed. And this 'giving up' thing, this learned helplessness disaster of the last 6 years or so...it came from the exhaustion of failing for the very last time that I could handle. It came from failing at a time when Gene was sick and going through treatment, a time when failure was not an option. Until, despite my best efforts, it became one. And it broke me. For a while.
So have I ever said to myself "Failure is not an option"? Just the once. I never really had to, before then. And when we found out his treatment failed, that became my failure, too. If I had only done more, been better, not been crazy, not had to go to Holly Hill, took better care of him, not been sick, figured out how to single-handedly cure Hep C...it was the failure of all failures for me. It was a failure that happened DESPITE doing my best and DESPITE the fact that failure was not on option and DESPITE the fact that I wasn't just failing myself, even worse, I was failing my new husband, a person that I swore to myself when I married him, I would NEVER fail in the ways that really matter. For me, all of this...it was the
Ultimate Fail...and it sucked. I had always assumed that if I tried really, really hard one day to do something that was really, really important, I would be able to. And I justified my lack of effort with anything, up to that point, by telling myself that there was nothing that important I really cared about. But real reason that I had not had more successes in my life? I stopped trying a long time ago for anything, any dream, any goal, unless I was either certain I could succeed or unless I fully accepted, and didn't care, that failure was an option. And after my Ultimate Fail, I stopped dreaming altogether and started doing...nothing. And SURPRISE! Apparently it's possible to do virtually nothing at all...for years...and STILL FAIL! Unbelievable!
So now I'm back to a situation that requires me to give 100%. A situation where failure is not an option. Because, now, for me, '"failure" quite literally means my death...my early, avoidable death. And I can't have this failure. Because this failure of an early, avoidable death would also mean that I have failed my sick husband...again...The thought of making him watch me die an early, avoidable death, the thought of him being left here, alone, in God knows what kind of mental decline, the thought of him possibly having to be taken care of by strangers who don't know him, don't know about Aspergers, or of someone else having Power of Attorney over him and having power to do things like force him to move, to leave his home or of him being put into a nursing home before it's really necessary just because there is no one left to care for him. The possibility of all of that makes the possible imaginary future of dying an early, avoidable death a failure that I can't currently live with, today. It's the type of failure that, if I weren't already dead, would destroy me. And I know this because my ability to prognosticate my possible futures, should I continue to avoid changing my life, has told me so. It's amazing to me that I am so supremely able to believe that the imaginary failures, past and future, are real, yet I have been unable to believe in the reality of the very real present that I live infor some time, now, despite being quasi-aware of the fact that it's a reality that will only continue to worsen until it turns into my very real future. If I do not accept my reality EVERY DAY and take actions EVERY DAY to better shape my future, I can guarantee you, in the end, my future will be far worse than anything I have ever been able to imagine about my life, in the past. I now realize that worrying about failure, all of these years, letting failure
be an option...it was always a luxury. And it's meant for those people who can factor in the possibility of failure as an unwanted, but still livable outcome for their lives and their future happiness. But for those of us who can't...for those of us see failure as the demise of the future they need in order to be happy, self sufficient, and hell, even alive...for us, failure is really not an acceptable option. Not any more.
Man...I really wish you had said that phrase to me a LOT sooner...like when I was in 10th grade...
If, every time we hit a snag, we can imagine a gazillion ways this latest bump will probably contribute to our ultimate failure, then I'm quite sure we can also imagine a gazillion ways we can fix it, in order to succeed.
It's true, we're not young any more and yes, we are grayer and plumper than we were when we were 18. But we're both SO smart, and kind, and capable and wise. We have SO many Super Powers! It's time that we finally turned those Super Powers on ourselves and used them for good, not evil.
