week 5
the kamikaze moment
When I am lost, I look for signs from the universe to tell me I’m either on track and to stick the course, or to run in a different direction. The week I started this blog, I happened to reread Tim Ferriss’s “17 Questions that Changed My Life.” The first question: “What if I did the opposite for 48 hours?” This whole project-experiment feels like doing the opposite. While everybody else chases “success,” I’m chasing failure! It was my first inclination that I might be onto something.
I am in week 5, and feeling like this whole thing feels like a kamikaze mission, a last-ditch effort after being served little but failure by the universe for so long. It feels like it will certainly end up in death—at least the death of my pride. There is a good chance that very few people in my life really understand why I’m doing this. There’s a good chance it’s making a lot of people in my life cringe with embarrassment for me. There’s a good chance that my family will not read this, or if they do, they will quickly stop and try to forget about it because the vulnerability is too excruciating to witness.
I can feel the desire for approval or success or a controllable outcome creep up on me. It’s there when I go to check the stats of my Squarespace website, when I send out cards with TheFailProject info (and then usually regret it the moment the mailman picks them up), when I post on the Facebook page I long ago abandoned. I constantly have to remind myself that the outcome isn’t the point, nor are other people’s opinions. It is the process that matters, the changing of my thought and behavioral patterns so they are more in line with my values and the kind of life I want to live. But all my learned and habitual defense mechanisms come up every day, and I often end up feeling like I’m in a battle royal within myself over a silly project.
I was listening to The Screenwriting Life podcast this week, and heard Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine) talk about the kamikaze moment of the hero’s journey, and I listened closer because kamikaze has been the word that keeps coming up for me. The kamikaze moment is when the hero makes a commitment that makes the whole audience cringe, brace themselves, yell “no, don’t do it!” because it’s just too risky and seems destined to end badly. It is the action movie’s hero facing almost certain death. It is the romantic comedy’s protagonist laying everything on the line for love. It is Olive being told she will be harshly judged and to not get up onstage to dance at the Little Miss Sunshine pageant, and Olive doing it anyway.
The whole point of this project is to take myself on a hero’s journey, knowing that I can’t control the outcome or reception by the world, but I can damn well set myself up to go through a dramatic internal change for the better. For better or worse, I am finally acting as the hero of my life. So I took this moment as a little smile from the universe, a tiny nod that suggests my kamikaze decision to start this journey might have put me on the right path after all.
failure #1
After sending out some cards with a sticker to this website, I failed to get my mom to read it (at least thus far). I can sense how uncomfortable this idea makes her, and I don’t blame her. “I haven’t read your blog yet,” my mom said to me on the phone this week. “You don’t have to read it,” I told her. “But I want to…”
I heard the pain in her voice when she said “I want to,” which brings me to tears every time I think about it. She really does want to. And I can’t blame her for being afraid. I am afraid. We both reflexively cringe at exposure, and this feels all too exposing of my inner thoughts, my private feelings, and… failures?! It’s too much, and I threw it at her without warning.
I feel like I really am experiencing a death of sorts, because as I reach toward becoming more of who I believe I truly am deep down and who I want to be, I’m killing off the version of me that existed in the world prior. I am changing, and part of changing means leaving behind the old. There is a grieving to this process, as I can only imagine exists for parents—watching their children grow up both in awe for the people they are becoming, and in grief for each passing stage.
If you’d asked me a couple years ago who I most identified with in Little Miss Sunshine, it would be the dad— the dad who was obsessed with the idea of “winning,” who had big ideas about what would make someone successful, who believed in his own potential, but got beaten down by the world because he was a “nobody.” The dad who thinks that “there’s no sense entering a competition if you don’t think you’re gonna win.”
I have done a lot of work to intellectually change my perspective and integrate the philosophy of Olive’s grandfather: “Losers are people who are so afraid of not winning, they don’t even try.”
Now, I’m trying to live like Olive, getting up onstage and dancing because it’s what I want to do, regardless of all the people in my life who would deem it too risky. I would love if someday my mom got up and danced with me. And the rest of my family. And maybe the audience of this project, whoever they may be. But me dancing my heart out is not dependent on anyone else. This is my kamikaze-level commitment. And maybe by being brave and letting myself be seen joyfully failing, someone else can feel permission to do the same.
Failure #2
I had a dream at the start of the week that I kept being thrown a basketball, and that I would go to shoot but couldn’t—my arms would get stuck at my chest. The net seemed to grow and keep growing farther and farther away from where I was standing, until I couldn’t even see it. I would move my arms out with the ball and they would immediately go back to my chest.
This was my sign from the universe to pick up a basketball again.
I think the last time I played was the seventh grade basketball team tryouts. I had talked for months (maybe even a couple years) about trying out for the basketball team. I’d only tried dance and individual sports like ice skating before, save for swim team which is kind of a team sport (with its own failures of mine, which will inevitably be faced here at some point). I was so excited. I’d had a basketball hoop in our backyard since second grade when I fell in love with Space Jam, the Chicago Bulls, and all things Michael Jordan. Though my practicing mostly consisted of playing H-O-R-S-E with my dad, I loved it and could picture myself on a team, dribbling between my legs and beautifully dodging opponents to score some shots. The summer before seventh grade, I bought a Claire’s bracelet that had a star charm with a basketball on one side and an inscription “property of a basketball player” on the other (instantly met with a “but what if you don’t make the team?” when I showed it excitedly to one of my parents). I couldn’t wait to be in middle school so I could finally be part of something, and I could practically feel the net jersey fabric on my skin that I would proudly wear everywhere to show I’d made the team.
When I walked into tryouts, I saw what felt like hundreds of other students there to tryout for the team as well. All I could hear was “But what if you don’t make the team?” I felt like walking out, but decided to stick it out. Sitting in the middle of the gym floor, the coach gave a lecture about how many times he took the team to state, about how most of us wouldn’t make the team because he looked for players with experience, about how serious and competitive the team would be but that he always saved one spot for a kid with a lot of heart. Please see I’m that kid.
We did warm-ups, drills, and then got into a game. I looked around at all the kids who had likely played on basketball teams before and felt so stupid for even being there. They seemed to know how to form patterns and be communicating with each other in a language foreign to me. I chased the ball from the safety of the middle of the pack where the ball wasn’t likely to come my way, simultaneously praying that he could see how hard I was working, sweat pouring from my beat red face, and telling myself that I really didn’t care if I didn’t make the team, and probably wouldn’t. Then the ball was passed to me.
I was wide open for a shot.
Here’s where the reality of the past splits in two for me, because I remember two different versions with equal clarity and belief in their existence. I remember freezing, not being able to shoot at all, and passing the ball back with embarrassed disappointment. I also remember shooting and being nowhere close to making the basket. In this moment, I’m leaning toward the first version of reality, that I froze, couldn’t shoot, and passed the ball back (which may or may not have gotten stolen by the other team). The reality that parallels the dream I had, where I couldn’t shoot the ball because my arms were frozen at my chest. Maybe for years I’d invented the other version, where at least I had tried to make the shot rather than throwing it away. (Hamilton’s “I’m Not Throwing Away My Shot” holds particular meaning for me).
In either past reality, I choked. Of course, I did not make the basketball team. I pretended I didn’t care, told my parents I knew I wouldn’t make it because I didn’t have any team experience and there were many more of us trying out than could make the team, and spent the next few months writing in my notebooks “I wish I made the basketball team” and immediately erasing it out of embarrassment. I didn’t pick up a basketball after that.
After my dream at the beginning of this week, I went to Dick’s and bought a basketball. I went to the park down the street from my house, and waited in the car until a family passed through and were out of sight. Then I took my basketball (realizing as I tried to bounce it that it needed to be more inflated) to the court. I lined myself up for a shot and missed, and then lined myself up and missed again. Then I made two shots in a row, and then missed many more. My shooting average would definitely be considered bad, maybe terrible, but I was actually making more shots than I’d anticipated. Maybe one day I can be brave enough to join a pickup game, and remember Sarah Silverman’s advice of shaking off the missed shots and to keep shooting, because that’s how you get better. In the meantime, I am going to fill my basketball with air and keep hitting the court a few times a week. No matter how much I stink or how fast/ slow I improve, the joy of playing is always worth it.