Celebrating Failure

“Failure”

         I have experienced failures in multiple ways. Some ways I have failed have totally been my fault, which happen to hurt the most. Keeping me humble or living in the past with regret at times. Failure hurts me, however with it I gain experience and factual data on what to and not do regarding the certain failure.

Depending on what the failure is, it varies how much of it I can take before giving up or also depending on the failure it depends how much it hurts each time it happens. Failure is a teacher, a painful one. With failure I have also felt the other side. The euphoric side where I feel alive, unstoppable, when the risk I took paid off or I challenged my self and followed through with it, regardless of the outcome. 

This semester I failed at my new job, twice, doing different things. The first failure was my inability of realizing a customer wrote his name wrong on a form and then trusting the system to correct it without double checking, in other words, the grammatical mistake stayed wrong. My supervisor found out and told me “it happens, everybody in this room has been written up before for that,” I felt bad but not very stressed, it was a common issue in my line of work. 

My second failure, I took home with me for a few days and it hurt. I failed to ask what “events” meant next to my name in the schedule, it led to me not knowing I had to work that day, so I didn’t show up. The following week multiple managers asked me “why didn’t I show up to work?” I had to apologize to four different managers for my dumb, new guy mistake. 

The third failure wasn’t my fault. At the beginning of spring break, I drove down to Tampa to visit my parents, thirty minuets into my visit, they had a total economic, behavioral and marriage collapse, right in front of me. My mother’s failure to keep her composure led to her quitting her job, loosing her car and jeopardizing her marriage. This failure followed me for a few weeks, made me responsible for her actions and inactions, having a ripple effect in all my other day to day activities.

I think failure can potentially make you stronger, experienced and wise. However, too much, and too harsh of failures can chip away parts of you that you later can’t get back. The effect depends on how the individual responds to it.