Meditations on Failure

Or, writing in a circle.

I’ve been a legal adult for almost fifteen years now.

Seeing it written out like that, instead of writing “I’m 32 going on 33”, made me laugh.

So basically I’m a teen in adult years.

Every year of these 15 years has been characterized by failure. Failures to launch and failures to finish. Failures to think and failures to feel. Failures to try and failures to practice. Failures to act and failures to stop. Failures to be real and failures to dream. Some negligible, some painful, a handful that I’m still nursing.

I remember my failures more than my successes.

Is this tendency shortening my lifespan? Tbd.

As of this writing, if someone were to ask me what I’ve “achieved” I’d say nothing and instead offer a long list of everything I lost in the process of trying to achieve something that could prove I was living a meaningful life, one that is equal parts of service and a damn good time.

I wear failure like I wear my own skin so that when the opposite happens it feels like an aberration in need of correction. Usually Life does the correcting for me and returns me to homeostasis…though I have been known to take matters into my own hands and help the process along.

In Julio Cortázar’s “Continuidad de los parques”, the man in his green velvet chair could die a thousand times and still read the same novel, excited to get to the good part only to be stabbed and then start reading all over again. The lovers in the story plotting his death are beside the point. So too is the man reading the novel beside the point. The point is the story, how it spirals and returns to the beginning, never losing form, tightly wound yet forever expansive. I feel the thread of my life unspooling itself like this the longer I spend figuring out life on Earth. A thread tightly wound in form yet unending in its iteration of failure. It’s frightening and humbling. There are no do-overs. Only trying and never succeeding but collecting memories all the same.

How to escape the cycle? Or is accepting this cycle the point?

I have no answers, only attempts and plenty of lessons from hopes dashed and dreams deferred until another trophy of failure is won, leading me to begin again.

At least this Sisyphus is well-moisturized.