a DNA that says oops

One of the many dichotomies of life: How failure really isn’t as bad as we make it out to be, while comfort is not really our friend.

Comfort Zones Suck (our lives away)

Feeling for a moment like a big fucking failure, I started re-reading one of my many success self-help books, because no one’s going to read it for me. I’m barely into the first chapter, when a sleepy creature groans and pokes it head above the debris of my life, peering out with bleary eyes.

Oh, wow, I haven’t seen this critter in a while! It’s my Hunger to Succeed.

It seems my comfort zone had been quietly lulling her to sleep with Lo-Fi music and stacking distractions up around her to hide her from view, once more trying to keep me from that scary thing called Change. Comfort zones do that. It’s their purpose, to shield us from the saber tooth tiger outside the cave.

“Just stay by the fire,” it says in our ear. “I know you’re hungry, but let someone else go hunt for food and possibly not come back. Be safe, don’t risk it.”

The comfort zone’s job is to protect us, keep us safely ensconced in our easy chairs in front of the television, where no one can break our hearts or tread on our egos. The people on the screen do all that for us now. No need to risk it ourselves anymore.

Our comfort zones are adept at sapping our confidence so we don’t put ourselves out there, and risk that most fearful of all creatures: Failure. But this is just silly.

It may sound ironic or even crazy, but without failure we’ll never know Success.

We can emulate others all we want, read their books, watch their YouTube videos, but until we put ourselves out there and actively fail at things, we won’t learn who we are, what we can do, what actually works for us in life. What our purpose is.

When We Learn to Hate Failure

Unless we were lucky enough to have a set of those truly inspired parents and teachers who know the score, most of us are brought up in a failure-unfriendly environment.

  • Classmates who jeer when you fall down, tripping up and bullying the one who fails–the supposed weak one–to keep the focus away from their own weaknesses.
  • Teachers and coaches who actively tear you down for coloring outside their lines, thinking outside their boxes, doing anything that might show you can be better at something than them.
  • Online peers who enjoy trolling and flaming your troubles as well as your accomplishments, to take the spotlight off of their own failed lives (otherwise they’d have more positive things to do and say).
  • Media content bent on Success, Success, Success! It’s all about Winning! Heaven forbid you fail at anything.
  • Commercial content bent on telling you what a failure you are … if you don’t buy and use their product to “fix” the situation.
  • Loving parents who only want to protect their offspring from harm, from the heartbreak of being a “failure”, so they try to teach them how important it is to win at all costs.

These are not easy things to put behind us when they are ingrained in us so young. I know: I am fighting this fear of failure on a daily basis, when I’m aware I’m giving in to the fear at all.

The Face of Failure

Failure is that awkward geeky kid with the big glasses who never gets picked for the team. The kid who now owns a multi-million-dollar corporation he started in his garage. All because he didn’t waste his time conforming.

Failure is that quirky kid who made jokes in class and drew pictures in her notebook instead of memorizing dates and names she would never ever need in real life; whose paintings now hang on a gallery wall and will create their own history.

Failure is how entrepreneurs become millionaires–or happy average people living their dreams. These people try everything, embrace the entire process as an adventure, including the failures. They know every attempt provides a lesson in what does and doesn’t work.

I want to be like them when I grow up.

It’s In Our DNA

There’s this string of organic programming that defines the form of all life on this planet, a string of molecules so complex it takes a supercomputer to unravel–and it was created from failure.

DNA makes mistakes all the time, called mutations. All life on this planet evolved from our DNA “learning” which of these random “defects” thrived. Without these mutations, life never would have happened, much less become anything complex or sentient.

We were created to fail! And that’s awesome. The problem is our view of failure, as a negative thing.

Our comfort zone, and the comfort zones of many of the people around us, cry out for safety. Don’t risk anything. Stay out of harm’s way. Don’t live. Don’t evolve. Die safe and unhappy and unfulfilled.

Wait… is this what we’re here for?

Find Success through Failure

Fuck that. Fail. Fail with abandon! Try awesome impossible things bound to fail!

Because once you get that forward momentum going, the little successes will start happening, too, more and more often as you learn what didn’t work; because, like Captain Marvel, you didn’t give up.

The only real failure is giving up before you get there.

And when you accidentally fall across one of those crazy impossible things that doesn’t fail? Then you will have found a thing no one else has found, because they were afraid to try: Your seed to Success.

If at first you don’t succeed; keep on sucking ’til you do succeed!

— Curly, from The Three Stooges

Evolution: It’s not just for DNA anymore.

As a beginning–or rebeginning (yes, I’m allowed to make up words, tyvm)–of my hapless blog addiction, I thought I’d share an apropos piece from my Women, Writing & Memoir class. It goes something like this . . .

Why are beginnings so hard?

Middles, that comfy popcorn-spilling-as-we-ignore-yet-another-movie-entwined-on-the-couch, seem so simple and inevitable. That so-perfect-we-can-just-let-it-happen practice at foreverness. Why don’t they give up on beginnings and just start relationships in the middle? I’m really good at middles, if I can only get past the beginnings.

Usually Zen and relaxed in the presence of other women, all it takes is an unexpected smile or a mysterious look from the right eyes and suddenly I find myself walking into the last interview of my dream job missing a shoe.

girl car breakdownIn the moments that follow, something goes clank under the hood: my speech centers misfire and stall, or wind up to a fever pitch with no direction to go. My eyes, once trusted to navigate the depths of a friend’s angst-ridden soul and plot a course to comfort, now seem out-of-balance gyros verging on gimbal-lock. And although I can’t see it from where I’m standing, I sense my body language has switched to an ancient form of semaphore, signaling to this lovely woman:

“The runway is open. The tower is aflame! Make your takeoff roll now!!”

Soon her enchanting smile dims to uncertainty, conversation veers from the fast lane to the pedestrian crosswalk, and then so does she. If only she could have seen who I really was.

If only we carried resumes, crisp off-white pages confirming the years of romantic service and exemplary skills in the face of love, detailed accounts of rendered kisses, massaged shoulders and feet, seemingly endless cuddles, misplaced Saturday mornings, laundry and dishes and meals joyfully created, giggling to tears and overlooked mistakes, races to say I’m sorry first, sunset walks holding hands, high fidelity and low maintenance and promises kept regardless, tallies of unexpected embraces, and turning to listen when she talks.

My resume is missing. Once more I’m ON …and no words can say what I’m wanting to say that won’t sound cheesy or crude, or perhaps even creepy. The First Impression monster has crept in, already checking off the destruction on a clipboard, shaking its head over the lost opportunity, another moment of life left unlived. Crime scene tape is unfurled as two souls part, wondering why life had no rewind button.

It’s not always this way. Strangers traipse into my life every day. But when the chemistry is missing my shyness lays sleeping, relaxed that nothing of importance is happening here. My true self wanders out and says hello, smiling and chatty and happy for the connection. The First Impression monster is observed daydreaming over coffee.

If ever I do see Love again, I’m sure it will have to sneak up on me, like in the movies, in the guise of someone so totally wrong for me that Shyness and First Impression run off to the beach together for the duration, giggling as they splash in the waves. And in moments of disinterested mundanity we let slip random anecdotes from our romantic resumes …

And it dawns on us: We can truly see each other—and the view is amazing!

Is it any wonder I’m majoring in making movies? I’m the perfectly hopeless protagonist of my own romantic comedy of errors. Or perhaps I’m just the pratfalling comedy sidekick.