An Ode to Failure

Hi, I’m Julie. I’m a perfectionist who’s terrified to fail.

I’ve been this way my entire life. I got near-perfect grades in grade school and university because I couldn’t handle anything less. I’m an overachiever out of necessity, because if I don’t achieve, I’ll feel like I let myself (and everyone else) down. Perfect grades are great in theory, but they’re not exactly something to celebrate once you realize why they’re happening.

Since graduating university, as I’ve been figuring out what I want my future to look like, I’ve been spending a lot of time leaning back into one of my life-long passions: writing. I love writing. Essays, stories, scripts, you name it. Writing is the thing that lights me up. I love creating characters and a narrative out of thin air. I love making sense of life with pen and paper.

I haven’t yet shared any of it publicly, though. As much as I love it and want to share this passion with my community, the thought of doing so still scares me into inaction. The fear seemingly stems from a bunch of different reasons, but most of them can ultimately be traced back to my perfectionist tendencies. I’m working on it, though.

In general, the past few years I’ve been trying to work on conquering various fears of mine. Something that’s really helped me do so is the phrase “feel the fear and do it anyway.” Basically, the whole point is not to ignore your fears or pretend they don’t exist, nor to live a life ruled by fear, but instead to sit with your fear and choose not to listen to it when making decisions. Fear is a protective mechanism which doesn’t need to be villainized, but it also shouldn’t get to be a dictator.

This attitude has helped in a bunch of different places in my life. Most recently, it helped me get over my anxiety about traveling solo. I listened to what the fear was telling me and worked through the feeling but didn’t let it stop me from doing what I wanted to do.

It’s worked for getting over the fear of submitting pieces I’ve written to contests and publications too, but I haven’t yet gotten it to work for the fear of sharing my writing myself. It’s hard to see the difference between the two things, but I think it mainly lies in the fact that if someone else publishes my writing, I get to stand behind their validation. On the flip-side, if I submit a piece somewhere and it doesn’t get published, no one ever really has to know that I “failed”. The stakes become so much greater once that veil is removed. There’s no barrier between you and your audience.

About 4 months ago, it was announced that I’d made the longlist for the CBC nonfiction prize for a piece that I’d written. Although I didn’t make it any further in the competition, I was proud of what I’d accomplished. Because I didn’t make it further though, my essay didn’t get published on CBC’s website, which meant it was up to me to share it if I wanted it to be read. I had every intention of doing so, and had lots of supportive friends and family asking to read it, but I just didn’t. I thought myself out of it until it had been so long that I was sure it wasn’t worth posting anymore ‘cause no one would care about it (I know, my brain isn’t always nice to me, I’m working on that too).

I told myself that I needed more of a following before I could post it, that my website needed to look better, that I needed to be published somewhere “real” before I could share my own writings, etc. I told myself all of these things because I was scared of the judgments of others.

Basically, I convinced myself that there would come a perfect moment for me to share what I’d written, and that this would prevent any criticism or judgment. In doing so, I deprived myself of the opportunity to be embraced by my community and to revel in the experience of sharing art with the world. The perfect moment never came.

I haven’t stopped writing, though. In the meantime I’ve been working non-stop on short stories and essays to apply to various other contests, and I’ve loved doing so, but I think I’ve been going about things in the wrong way. Awards and publications are great, don’t get me wrong, but they shouldn’t be the end goal of creativity. I want to make things for the sake of making them. I want to share art and writing that hasn’t been deemed worthy by a panel of judges simply because I think art is meant to be shared.

There’s an inherent vulnerability that comes with publicly sharing anything one has created, though, and vulnerability can be unsettling and challenging for most people. It’s the same sort of vulnerability that comes with simply being seen having wants and needs. Even if your creative endeavors aren’t done in the pursuit of fame or success, they still typically involve a certain amount of saying “hey, I want you to look at what I’ve made and feel a certain type of way about it.” If you do have dreams of creative success, then you’re stepping out into the arena for everyone to watch you potentially stumble. Artistic failure, therefore, isn’t simply failure in a quantifiable sense, but it’s also the failure to have your needs met by others.

Being seen trying can feel deeply embarrassing. To be seen openly wanting is to be made vulnerable - to stand with your arms open, ready to receive, means you can’t stand with your arms up, ready to fight. If you put something out into the world, you leave room for judgment and criticism from your peers, all of which is necessary in the artistic process, but still hard to deal with. If you’re a Hollywood nepo baby who has always gotten what they want, you might not ever struggle with this process, but for anyone with trauma or a fragile nervous system, this type of vulnerability is troublesome. At least, it is for me.

The fear of failure also creates a binary out of failure and success that doesn’t allow for any nuance. There’s a voice in my head telling me that if I’m not a total success in everything I do, then I’m a failure. It tells me it’s one or the other, black or white, pass or fail. Either you become an uber-successful artist or you’re nothing.

Because of this, when I try to write or create anything, I’m so focused on the outcome that I often can’t even begin the process of creating. It’s the perfectionism-procrastination feedback loop: the thing I’m making has to be perfect in order for me to share it, but perfection is too overwhelming so I might as well not try at all. I get in my own way by thinking 10 steps ahead of myself, circumventing the joy that exists in the process of stumbling around in the dark. Even now, while writing this, I’m focused on how the end product is going to look to anyone who reads it.

The success-failure binary also leads me to much more quickly classify parts of my life as failures. This past September, I took a big leap and drove across the country to BC to spend some time living nomadically, working on farms, and slow traveling the PNW. Recently, I’ve been feeling like I “failed” at this experience.

Basically, I’d naively expected that my life would look like a coming of age movie or a perfect Tiktok clip compilation set to a catchy Indie song. I thought I’d easily make a group of like-minded friends and spend every weekend going on crazy trips in the wilderness. This hasn’t happened like I thought it would for a bunch of different reasons, and therefore my brain has leapt to classify myself and the whole experience as a failure.

It’s easy to see the faulty logic when I say these things out loud or write them down. Failure isn’t remotely as black and white as I make it out to be. When you only accept perfection as “success”, it’s too easy to disregard experiences or work that are simply good or even just complex and layered. There were incredible parts of the year. I got to go whale-watching in Vancouver, surfing in Tofino, I hiked up mountains, swam in some of the most beautiful lakes I’ve ever seen, worked on a farm for the first time, camped in incredible campgrounds, spent a couple weeks exploring Seattle, etc. Because parts of the experience as a whole were lacking though, my perfectionist brain wants to call the whole thing a wash. It’s silly, I know, but there are parts of our brains that don’t like to cooperate with logic.

This mindset doesn’t align logically with any of my values, either. It doesn’t take much dissection to realize perfectionism is a tool of capitalism. The ideal of perfection keeps us locked into “hustle” and “grind” mindsets, hiding the bad parts of our lives from each other because they’d reveal us to be flawed, and competing with everyone around us in the quest for individualistic excellence instead of finding strength in community.

Capitalism tells us that if we aren’t perfect, we should feel shame and hatred towards ourselves, and this self-hatred makes a handful of billionaires somewhere even more wealthy. Beauty, self-help, and weight loss are all billion dollar industries predicated on the idea that none of us are “good enough” and should always strive to one day become so.

Perfectionism is pretty intricately linked with colonialism and white supremacy too. We’d never expect perfection out of nature, right? We don’t love going for long walks outdoors because every tree is the ultimate height and shade of green. We don’t feel called to the ocean because it acts each day exactly as it should. Nothing in nature is perfect. So why are humans expected to be?

Simply put, Western colonialism posits that mankind is apart from and above nature. It asks us to put ourselves on top of the pyramid of importance instead of viewing ourselves as just another integral part of nature. This belief system is how we become convinced that it’s okay to hoard resources and abuse the environment.

If we’re above nature which is allowed to be imperfect, we must therefore be expected to be above imperfection too. Colonialism and white supremacy operate using hierarchy and ask us to always strive to be the perfect people at the top of the pyramid. They use perfectionism as a tool to hold themselves upright. Tema Okun and Kenneth Jones even listed perfectionism as one of the fifteen characteristics of white supremacy in a paper on white supremacy culture.

These ideals worm their way into our subconscious brains whether we want them to or not. We’re all trained day in and day out to act in ways that support capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, etc. When I operate from my perfectionist brain, I’m following this subconscious training instead of acting in a way that would benefit the kind of world that I want to live in: one that’s community-oriented, decolonized, and that equitably supports all people.

In that world, I plan to be a wise, old, grey-haired Aunty who has lived a full, wild life. You don’t get to be wise by never fucking up, though. The kind of life and life experience I want isn’t one that can exist if I refuse to try anything new because I might fail at it, but it’s gonna take some intentional deprogramming to get there.

Another part of that deconditioning for me is learning to reframe failure itself. Part of the reason why failure is scary is because of how definitive it is, I think. Failure often feels like a full stop or like an ending. It isn’t though, most of the time. Failure can be a jumping off point or a redirect, which is how I’m choosing to see it.

Take any of the contest submissions I’m working on, for example. It’s easy to submit a story, have it get rejected, and throw that story right into the trash because it didn’t win or get published. What I’m trying to do instead is recognize the rejection as the story simply not finding its audience. Just because the piece I wrote wasn’t right for that one publication, doesn’t mean it’s not worth sharing at all. Like I said before, there’s a lot of nuance to be found if you leave room for it.

Or maybe what I’ve made is truly shit. So what? I’ll rework it, edit it, transform it into something that I like more and that feels more authentic to me. There aren’t any rules for how creativity or art has to work. I get to decide what to do with the things I make.

I want to share my art and writing for the same reasons that humans always have - art is meant to be shared. Recently, I was out for coffee with a dear friend of mine who is a self-proclaimed history nerd. She shared with me that it was recently discovered that neanderthals, long considered to be unsophisticated, might have been making cave art long before homo sapiens did. The thought made my heart soar. Even our not-entirely human relatives were making art for others to see. Whether you’re putting your new painting up on a cave wall or your Instagram page, the instinct comes from the same urge - to observe, to document, to connect, to proclaim to ourselves and others that we were here: we lived, we felt, we loved.

In order to begin sharing it though, I need to find a way out of the endless loop of perfectionism. My perfectionist brain will try to trick me into believing that the only way to stop the loop is by achieving perfection - creating something that’s perfect or having the perfect life - but I don’t believe this to be true. Perfection is an impossibility, but my brain tells me that it’s worth striving for so that it can keep me stuck safely in my comfort zone.

The real way out of the loop, I think, is just to jump. To put myself out there, as messy as my attempt is, and simply sit with whatever comes of it.

Basically, I’m writing this to say that I intend to try, even if it means I’ll stumble and fail sometimes, and even if it scares me. I want to be someone who readily steps out of their comfort zone and leans into hard and uncomfortable times because that’s how you develop grit and wisdom. I want to be a person who isn’t afraid to look stupid or silly, simply because I think those people are cool. I want to try new things without worrying about the outcome of my attempts. I want to love the creative process without worrying if the things I create will be perfectly received. I want the mess that comes from being in relationships and community with other imperfect people. I want a messy life. I want to make messy art.

So, let me start over. Hi, I’m Julie. I’m a recovering perfectionist who’s doing her best to embrace failure. I’d love it if you came along for the ride.