Learning To Be The Fool

I feel like I’m beginning to learn how to fail correctly. I’ve failed plenty of times before, but I don’t feel like I learned much from those times. I could only focus on how horrible it felt and how I had to keep myself from failing, even if that meant never trying again. This was never explicit in my thinking, but has manifested itself throughout my life in anxieties and inability to focus on projects that could lead me to fail in some spectacular way.

I listen to Jordan Peterson a lot these days. His psychological insight is especially helpful to me, and one of the things I’m starting to embrace this year is learning to be a fool before I can be a master. He talks about how people need to be able to do a thing badly before they can master it and he bears that out in his own life. In public.

I recently watched him in a long-form dialogue with respected Muslim figure, Mohammed Hijab. One of the first things that happened is that Mohammed Hijab asked, pointedly, what Jordan Peterson meant by his recent Message to Muslims, and if he understood that he came off as rather condescending. Jordan Peterson replied that what he was doing was communicating badly, because he was utterly ignorant, but knew no other way of beginning a dialogue with a culture he didn’t understand and that that was why he was there that day. He bared his ignorance and desire for knowledge and understanding to Mohammed Hijab, and I saw the discussion immediately take a better turn. It was still difficult, but humility smoothed the way.

But it wasn’t just humility, it was the fact that he was willing to start badly.

I can’t count how many times I’ve run up against the fear of failure and doing something badly enough to garner public mockery. I’m sure it’s a major factor in why I’ve failed to complete a single original manuscript while I’ve churned out over a million words of fanfiction. Fanfiction just doesn't have the same stakes as selling original work does. I daresay the community of readers is a touch more close-knit and a tiny bit more understanding because reading and writing fanfiction itself is often seen as the semi-embarassing hobby we share in common, then it's subdivided into communities around favorite shows/books/films/video games. Contrast those baseline connections with some of the one star reviews for truly incredible books on Amazon and you can see why it's scary to put your obviously inadequate story out for public consumption.

I have a desperate need to do any creative endeavor correctly and be understood by anyone reading or listening to me communicate.

I’m just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord! Please don’t let me be misunderstood.
--The Animals

Some days it seems the only way to avoid being misunderstood is not to say anything at all. The only way to not fail is to not try. This is so much easier, but this wounds the soul in an entirely different way than failure does. With failure, there can be growth, like tearing a muscle that rebuilds itself stronger. Refusing to try feels like suffocation, or being incrementally crushed. The soul continues to cry out for the thing it knows it was meant to do in this world.

This year, I set out with four goals to stretch myself in areas I was somewhat familiar with. Even so, each was different enough from what I usually do to carry the potential of failure. At the end of the year, I will write more about the goals and how far I got, but as I push through some of my fears, I feel like I’m finally learning something. I can tell that I will not meet all my goals as originally delineated, but I have moved toward each in varying degrees and have a better idea of what to set as my goals for next year.

I want to try, even if I fail miserably.

Some days I can’t face the ideals I’ve set and I give up inside, turn away, and stuff my brain full of distraction because I can’t stand being the person who fails at what she’s meant to do. I used to distract myself all the time, but even in that there is a difference now. Now, I let myself lose a day or two, maybe a week, and then come back to the task when I have the strength to take a few more steps.

I look at all this, and I wonder, is it coming? The time when I will be able to pen the stories I've always wanted to? I can almost see it. It may still be a few years away, but I feel like I can through the desert to the promised land on the other side.

I wonder if that's what I was missing. I was so set on being in the promised land that I refused to accept the desert as part of that picture. I kept thinking there had to be a way around the desert, kept trying to skirt it or find some way of cheating failure. Then I sat down and waited for the desert to blow away. Maybe what I needed was to face the desert and start walking into it. Maybe...