You Failed. Now What?

“hell man I know very well you didn’t come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except you’ve got to stick to it with the energy of a Benny addict.” — Kerouac

Failure fucking sucks.

It takes away your hope. It makes you feel like you’ve never made a right decision ever in your life and worse: you never will again.

Failure makes you feel like what you want isn’t possible.

It sits at the edge of your bed every morning and laughs in your goddamn face. It reminds you — goddamn reminds you — that you’re not good at anything — or ever will be good at anything. It leaps around in your stomach, it bangs on your temples and squeezes at your tender heart and taunts: Youuuuuuuu. You’re doing all the wrong things!

Then it wakes you up in the middle of the night, like the goddamn asshole that it is, and says: You don’t even know what the right thing is.

You’re doing it wrong

And you want to know the WORST thing about Failure: It’s right. By the time you’re failing, you are on the wrong track and you are definitely doing it wrong.

In fact, you veered off the path ages ago. Only you don’t realize it, so you’re flying your goddamn airplane in the middle of two storms with no place to go. You could have just stayed, of course, but you didn’t so now all you can do is fly and pray for air. Only there isn’t any air, because it’s all being sucked up by the goddamn storms you decided to fly into. So you basically take off knowing you’re going to crash, but you’re too focused on flying to see that it’s a mistake, that there was another way — there’s always another way — you just didn’t see it.

So you fly into the goddamn mess like an asshole, and everyone is screaming at you to turn around, but you can’t hear them above your failing engine. All you can hear is that goddamn voice: “Just keep going, you can do it!” and so you do, but its a big mistake, because guess what? You’re going to fail.

You fail

Didn’t catch that? Let me try again: You fail.

You fail. You failed. You failed.

And you want to know the absolute worst thing about all of it?

It’s a good thing.

You goddamn have to fail.

Why?

Why??

WHY???

Because:

Failing sets you on the right track

You don’t know it yet, but Failure is doing you a giant solid in the worst possible way. Because by the time Failure gets called in, you are past the point of nudging, of suggesting, of “You might consider…” Yeah, it tried that already and you didn’t listen.

Remember??

Failure happens when you’ve turned your head the other way for too long. When you persevered beyond the point of reason, beyond hearing anything but your own selfish wants.

Failure is shouting at you. It’s screaming all the things you don’t want to hear. It’s picking a fight. It’s brawling. It’s smashing that bottle over your head because you just couldn’t, you just wouldn’t…stop.

Just. Stop.

But you can’t. Stop, that is. So you just keep going at it, fighting like the goddamn sucker that you are. Which only makes it worse you lollipop sucking fool.

And the more you fail, the harder you try! You in your goddamn justified justifiableness. You just keep trying because you don’t know what else to do.

Only no one tells you that there’s nothing to do. There’s not a goddamn thing you can do.

Besides fail.

Just fail.

Why?

Why??

WHY??!?

Because the truest truth that NO ONE ever, ever tells you:

You didn’t actually fail

You just weren’t doing the thing that really matters to you. The thing(s) you were “meant” to do. That’s how come failing doesn’t make you a failure. That’s right: Failure is a choice, not a circumstance.

If you dust yourself off, learn from it and try again, well then, someday you’ll look back and remember the time when you did that thing that didn’t work, but it led you to the thing that did.

As Paul Jarvis says, “Failure may be demoralizing, but it’s not that important.”

So….

What now?

Quit and try something new.