Failure

I came across this quote the other day:

An essential part of creativity is not being afraid to fail.

Edwin Land

Failure.

Ah. The dreaded “f” word. (No, not THAT f-word.)

Failure is described as “ a lack of success or the inability to meet an expectation

No one wants to experience it but everyone will experience it at least once in their life. Well…more, if we’re being truly honest.

As writers, we especially hate the word failure. It haunts us every time we sit down to try and bust out the next great American novel. What if….what if they hate my book? My story? My poetry?

We don’t want to feel vulnerable. We don’t want people to realize that we’re not perfect, even though there is no such thing as perfection in this world.

We all want to be successful. #amiright? And success will come! It will! But we must be willing to accept that we will experience failure from time to time. Those rejection letters come. We lose our job. We don’t make the team, etc..

We must be willing to accept that we will fail in life. We must be willing to learn from that failure and strive to work harder in order to put that failed experience behind us. The more we focus on that failure, the more we fall behind.

Avoiding failure is something we all struggle with. And as long as we live in this world….well…it’s something we will always have to deal with.

We’re all afraid of failing. I know I definitely am. Maybe that’s why I don’t set high expectations anymore. I don’t want to keep failing.

Writing has always been a passion of mine. Ever since I was 9 years old and wrote my first essay on what I wanted to be when I grew up. Somewhere along the road though I put my passion for writing on the back burner. I lost interest for a little while. Depression set in. My grades in school plummeted. I went from being an honor student to barely scraping by.

But then one day I picked up my pen/pulled up a blank document. And I began writing again.

I picked myself up.

Don’t let failure become the norm in your life. Pick yourself up…brush yourself off and start again.

It WILL get better. Success WILL come.

We must not be afraid to fail.