Ur Friend Failure

time to get cozy

*before we dive in, please know this piece addresses suicide and drug addiction*

We’ve all heard the phrase, what would you do if you knew you could not fail? 

At face value, the idea is wholesome. It’s supposed to inspire, break down barriers of insecurity and have you aiming for the moon. What could be so bad about that, right? 

When do we even start worrying about failure?

Children don’t worry about failing, instead they take a concept and run with it. They decide they’re going to be a star, an astronaut, the captain of a ship. They dare to imagine an exciting existence and this hope propels them forward into various stages of achievement. 

But for most of us, there will be shifts in the dream. There might be compromises, which ends up leading to adaptive thinking that opens up an entirely new path. There is poetry where we least expect it, actualizing in the most surprising ways. Trust the process and you will be rewarded with a way forward. 

Before we get too ahead of ourselves, we have to acknowledge that there is usually a prologue to all of this magical change.

Failure. Ultimately, failure is a huge part of our experience.

The definition of failure is literally: lack of success, inability to perform a normal function, even deficiency and decay.

Just looking at it can make me cringe:
failure
failure 
failure 

Not to brag, but over the course of my high school career I only received three B grades (1 in Freshman Dance and 2 in Spanish).

This is partially because the three high schools I went to were not very challenging academically, but I managed to keep this up even in my AP classes. I did this because I thought if I was in school I might as well do the best I could. With that track record, you would think I would be unfamiliar with our friend failure.

But I also dropped out of school twice.

In second grade I got a terrible fever and my mom convinced me that it was my body telling me I should be homeschooled. I took the bait and ~plot twist~ spent a year of my life taking care of my ailing mom while reading a Jane Austen biography and old geography textbooks on the side. Will & Grace were my best friends and every once in a while I’d watch Sesame Street for some math lessons.

When child protective services paid a visit to my home, we knew the gig was up and I went back to school. I was too young to process this as failure, but that’s exactly what it was. 

I was very uncool in school. For years I only had two friends, who I didn’t feel connected to. My time at home was mostly spent as a caretaker to my mom, which couldn’t be communicated to my peers. Because of this double life, I was deeply uncomfortable whenever I stepped on campus. Finally when I hit freshman year I had what I can only describe as a mental break that caused me to drop out all together. I couldn’t last three weeks in the high school big leagues and now I had no plan. I felt like a total failure. Ashamed of myself, I ignored the calls from the one friend who noticed my absence (the other one had gone to private school) and hid out. 

That year was a pivotal turning point in my life, one that has led me to believe that big things do happen for a reason.

One morning, a few months into my failed freshman year, I discovered an empty bottle of sleeping pills that we had picked up from the pharmacy a day earlier. My mom was on a lot of medication at that time and would often take a double dose of something if I didn’t monitor her. Because I was still on a school sleep schedule, I was awake at 8 AM and realized she must have taken multiple doses overnight. My dad worked late shifts at a restaurant and normally slept in till noon, but I woke him up, knowing that time was of the essence. I told my dad we needed to take my mom to the hospital and we carried her into the car. 

The next few months felt like eons. The ER doctors didn’t believe my dad when he gave them a lengthy list of medications. Instead they chose to treat my mom as an attempted suicide. This was a couple years before the opioid crisis was headline news. While my dad and I didn’t know what her intentions were with this overdose, we knew she couldn’t be without the medication she’d been reliant on for 11 years. The doctors refused to listen and my mom was taken to the psychiatric ward and put into a 72 hour lockdown. This sudden detox completely put her body into shock. She suffered a heart attack, started having continuous seizures and eventually the doctors put her into a medically induced coma. 
TLDR: it was rough times.

The day she was released from the hospital, my parents and I sat together in the living room for the first time in months, not speaking. We just stared out the window at the bright blue sky. My mom was off her medications and after having walked through fire, was seemingly given the chance to start anew. After a long period of being reliant on a web of pills, we hoped to finally see what her symptoms were like without all the medication’s side effects.
We’d waited and prayed and longed for this moment. I remember distinctly feeling like the movie of our life should end.

This is when the camera pans away from us for the last time, I imagined credits rolling across the sky.

It turns out we had a long way to go. The first night I was alone in the apartment with my mom, she erupted into a fit of anger and kicked me out of the house. It was clear she didn’t know who I was, calling me names like tramp and dime store hooker (which I now find to be an incredibly funny word choice). 

I set out on foot to my Los Angeles grandmother’s apartment, with nothing but my cell phone. We’d later discover my mom has permanent amnesia, an erasure of the 11 years she was sick and heavily medicated.

It seems the hospital had failed my mother and the effects were irreversible. At that time I didn’t know if I would see her again. 36 hours after being crowned a dime store hooker I was in Chicago, living with my other grandparents. We hadn’t spent much time together but they took me in and did everything they could to make me feel at home. We went to dairy queen and panera bread often, opting (in a very midwest way) to fill the void with food when I got sad. To some it would be hell, but for me that was heaven.

Meanwhile, the situation in LA was precarious and a plan was workshopped in which I would permanently live with my grandparents and go to school with my cousin. But the fates weren’t having it and by September I was back in LA, attending a new high school. That time away gave me an opportunity to start fresh, meeting friends through a small theatre camp. For once I had the experience of just being a kid.

I gained a little bit of confidence and a lot of perspective on the fragility of life. I may have failed many times before the age of 16, but I was here to tell the tale. That had to be worth something, I had to be worth something.

Would I go on to fail again and again? 

Yes, many times over. Relationships, actually staying in college, artistic passions, entire dreams even! But the inherent embarrassment one might feel around these experiences has thinned out, instead becoming a form of curiosity. 

I guess a better question might be:
What would happen if I knew that it could fail?
What would happen if I could get up and restart?
What would happen if I discovered a new way of existing?

Because everything is temporary, yet life—in many cases—is very very long. 

I meant to write a piece about the nature of projects, but that concept was kind of a failure too. I think the thing that should come forward always will, it just takes showing up to receive it. Again and again and again.

That’s all for today, and thank you for showing up to receive these letters.

Don’t forget to send in your moments to momentsfornow@gmail.com

P.S.
This Sunday I’m opening the books for Personalized Meditations!

I’ve had this planned for a while and now is finally the time.

After you purchase the meditation, you will receive a questionnaire that will shape the meditation I write for you.

You can choose a length of 15-20 or 25-30 minutes. An audio link will be sent to you within 10 days of completing the questionnaire.

This first round the books will be somewhat limited and paying subscribers will get an option to sign up first! For everyone else, I’ll drop the link in Sunday’s Moments for Now, so be sure to tune in.

Looking forward to embarking on this new experience with you !

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