Failure. It Happens.

I recently discovered that I have spent my entire life avoiding failure. If I wasn’t good at something, I didn’t like it – ask me about my love of Topgolf. Most of my adult life I have worked a full-time job while doing one or two (or three or four) side hustles – not because I needed money, but because I felt like I was failing if I wasn’t spread thin and busy all of the time. I have stayed in relationships that needed to come to an end for one reason or another just because I didn’t want to look like I was a shitty girlfriend/wife. I chased job titles that made me sound WAY more important and on a higher pay grade than I was because I cared about my business-related reputation. 

 

I think I finally have gave that up in my thirty fourth year on this planet. Like everyone else on Earth, 2020 brought on a lot of change for me. I’ve never been one to sit around and do some hardcore introspection but with the world slamming on its brakes, I had a lot of time to myself to really dig into what I wanted in life. What I wanted (if inquiring minds must know: a pink pony on roller-skates and a briefcase containing $1,000,000) was definitely not what I got. I got a big ol’ truck load of failure. I went through a divorce, I had to learn what dating looked like after being out of the game for almost a decade, I got laid off for the first time ever, I went to work for a company that I wasn’t in love with/hated the commute/would eventually get laid off from, wah wah wah and so on. 

 

What I didn’t realize at this time was that the big ol’ truck load of failure was actually a large prickly pile of lessons learned. Some hurt more than others, but it taught me that I am a Hell of a lot more resilient than I thought I was, and it taught me that is completely okay to fail at things. 

 

Now that I have an outlet to share my failures, I can say that if it’s okay for me to fail at things that it is okay for you to fail too.