Week 4

the failure wound

“Anything you do not bring forth that is within you will destroy you and anything that you bring forth that is within you will save you.”

I recently listened to Elizabeth Gilbert quote this in the podcast We Can Do Hard Things. She talks about her love wound, and how even being called “beloved” by millions of people who adored her work such as Eat, Pray, Love could not heal it. “If I have an infinite love hunger that’s bottomless, (and I know that it is, because I’ve had it my whole life. And it doesn’t matter what anybody throws in there, it’s just a black hole…) …the only possible remedy for infinite love hunger is infinite love. And that’s what I always thought, which is why I was out there looking for it in all these other people.” Spoiler alert: searching for a cure from the outside didn’t heal the wound.

I am coming to accept that there is no amount of success will or would ever heal my failure wound. There is no amount of money that will fill it. There is not a house big enough. There is not an award with enough prestige. There is no volume of accolades. There is not enough attention. There is no combination of these things that could truly heal me and make me finally feel whole.

I wonder about my failure wound, just as I wonder about my pending diagnosis of an autoimmune blood clotting disorder. Is it inherited through genes? Acquired from an insidious infection? Developed over years of neglecting my health? Am I dealing with a wound that has been passed down by my parents, whose own failure wounds have been passed down by their parents? Or, is it a wound that has been festering after a few traumatic failures, a wound that never gets to scab over before it’s being ripped apart again?

I have wonderful, loving parents, each of whom achieved relatively high levels of success by almost any standard: My father, as a neuroscientist, with big ideas about how the brain functions and what that could mean for science and medicine, and my mother as an educator and leader who is a fierce advocate of the public school system and its strengths for students with disabilities. I would never for a second look at them and see failure, and I can’t imagine that anybody else would. I watched them work themselves to the bone, through late nights, family vacations, illness and devastating life events. They care about the results, about work ethic, about doing the best possible job for all involved. They care about not letting down the team of people they work with, and even more importantly, the individuals they work for. They are adamant about the necessity to make a positive impact in the world. They instilled in me a work ethic that I am mostly proud of and sometimes feel burdened by, but that feels like an essential part of my family’s reputation, identity, and legacy. But I wonder… is there a wound underneath the relentless pursuits?

I can’t help but picture a tether between my own failure wound and the possible failure wounds of my parents, an umbilical cord of sorts through which they give me everything they can for me to be successful, and in return, I pass back failure after failure. It must have been excruciating for them to have given me so much and to watch me get rejected from Northwestern, miss making the basketball team, fall in ice skating and get yelled at by a coach, royally fumble playing the timpani and singlehandedly ruin a band concert, audition for play after play and get mostly non-speaking parts, get rejected from Northwestern again, and come home crying time and again after failed tests, humiliations by teachers, and shattered hopes of finally finding my “niche” (as my father had promised I eventually would). Maybe my failure wound is knowing I was given every possible chance to succeed and I still managed to screw it all up.

Each failure made it harder to believe that the next thing I tried wouldn’t also be a failure. The failures quickly compounded and increasingly weighed me down for every subsequent thing I tried, which would almost all end in failure, at least in part because it’s really freaking hard to give all your focus and energy to the task at hand when you feel like you’re carrying the weight of all your disappointments.

As you can imagine, this cycle can get really out of hand as quickly as credit card debt or a Netflix binge. It was hard to keep hoping. It was hard to keep trying. And I don’t know any other way to lighten the weight of what I carry except to stare down the universe and say, “yeah, you want me to fail? Great! Because guess what?! I’ve had enough of trying for success, I’m going to focus on failing for once. So bring it on. I triple-dog-dare you.” (What can I say? I watched a lot of Bring It On and A Christmas Story growing up).

I also have a sneaking suspicion that “success” might be more than a little sneaky. As I watched my parents achieve more variations of success, I also watched them forced to reconcile the vision they had held about how success would look, versus the reality of the outcome of their work. There was always a discrepancy, no matter how slight or invisible to everyone else. The outcome never quite lived up to the grandiosity of the vision. Maybe that’s the way it always is with people who dream really big. Maybe the best we can hope for is to “mind the gap” between the vision and the outcome, and strive to close the gap by tiny increments over time. Maybe our movement toward the vision is the real success we can celebrate, and our failures the beautiful benchmarks of striving.

failing again

This week, I got another rejection letter from a second production assistant program where I applied. It was such a kind and thoughtful rejection, full of positive, hopeful energy and useful nuggets of information. I may save this notice as a great example of how to deliver rejections (or just disappointment) to others in a really considerate way. It wasn’t personal to me. I was just blind copied along with dozens of others who were getting the same notice. But it felt personalized and gave me a soft place to land from the fall of realizing I’d failed yet again, and made me want to work to make my application that much better for the next round.

failing again, again

I submitted two pages of my new script for live editing in my writer’s group. The teacher of the class is widely and deeply respected, and I thought I was going to be sick as she presented my script and read my scene direction aloud. The loglines a couple weeks ago were one thing, but two pages of a script. Ahh. Why did I sign up for it?!

She read my logline (An overly imaginative teacher plagued with severe OCD fights for the chance to teach at the nation's best college preparatory-- which also happens to be the high school that had traumatized her as a student) and said “great logline.” (Wait, what?! A great logline?! I’ve never been told I have a great logline! Could it be that I am actually getting better?!)

She told me it was very well written, and I braced myself for the “but.” She then asked me if I could hear where I went just a bit too far, where it was just a bit over-written. If I had to guess, it would be where our protagonist turned into a cockroach in a surrealist moment of panic. I stumbled that I wasn’t sure if I wrote too many words to the point that it didn’t flow. “There is absolutely nothing wrong with the words that you wrote. I just want you to edit to make what you want to stand out, stand out. Do you want the enclosing walls or do you want the cockroach?”

I wanted the cockroach. I said that because she was overly imaginative and also extremely anxious, I wanted moments of weird magical realism. She asked me if that was going to be an element throughout the whole script, and instinctively I said yes, and knew it had to be. So she said “great, keep the cockroach, cut this part, tighten it up over here. Rewriting is just about focusing on the parts that you love and doing what you can to elevate them.”

I love this perspective of rewriting. It was the best, most encouraging and helpful writing feedback I have gotten in a very long time. And a year ago I would have been too scared to put my hat in the ring for edits. Or to make my protagonist turn into a cockroach

failing, but 1% better

Just trying to get 1% better each time I try something. I started at a 7% accuracy on my first attempt at filling out a blank world map. I’m now at a whopping 21%!