Accepting Failiure:

In many ways, my anxiety makes me very similar to my cat. Inside the house, she is the master of her domain. However, when the door is open — when the outside encroaches on the inside — she burrows under the bed. I frequently wish I could join her. We are both, at heart, anxious creatures.

Living with anxiety has been difficult, and I knew that finally exploring writing at university would be challenging because of it. Literature, and the creation of it, is something that has been my obsession since my first typewriter at five years old. However, I am not a woman that can stand to fail, and this has stifled me. I am so scared of failure that as an adult in her mid-thirties all I have successfully written is half of a short story. Naturally, the interview that I had to conduct as part of my first course was terrifying. I would have to put words to page and allow myself to be judged on the quality of them. So, I selected a comfortable candidate, or at least I thought I did. J*, a woman I discovered is so sure of herself it still intimidates me. If I am a house cat, she is a lioness. She insists on buying me dinner before we record the interview at her home. I quickly down a strong drink lest she, of all people, sees straight through me, pretending at writing.

Her lounge is warm and inviting, dimly lit by a lamp. Scattered around are colourful replicas of toucans, some bought by her, others by her loving friends. I knew that thanks to her career as an Oncology nurse, J would have much insight on death, so I focused my interview preparation on reading about the subject. Not much of it surprised me. People are terrified of dying and are not usually prepared to face their end (Armstrong-Coster, 2004). I asked her all the questions I felt I should, about death and what she thought we could do differently as a society to prepare people for the end of their life. I asked about her sister, who died suddenly of cancer, her lifelong smoker’s cough covering the sound of her illness, and about her son, who survived his cancer due to luck and resources. The conversation is deep and she talks openly, but most of it was not anything that I did not expect. Except for one answer.

I ask her, out of general interest rather than anything else, about the further study she undertook to get a better job and help support her family. During this time she lived at her in-laws’ house with her husband and three young children. She describes the experience as “…horrible…worse than anything I’ve ever experienced with bloody cancer. Cancer’s a piece of cake”. The more I think about it, the more the comment calls into question my anxiety around failure.

I am not one to think about the inner lives of other people. Sure, I can sit and concentrate on them, pretend that I know, invent stories about what I think might be going on in their heads. When I am going about just living, however, I am very self-focused. Why had I assumed that J’s confidence and success had just come naturally to her? She herself had admitted: “… I’m only where I am today, from an expert nursing point of view because of the experience I’ve had over forty years of nursing”. I’m not even forty years old yet! She has been developing her skills for longer than I have been alive. No wonder she was so self-assured. Surely, developing your confidence is just a part of life that gets easier with time?

In contrast to J, if I am not immediately good at something, if I do not find it easy straight away, I put it aside. The barrage of dusty instruments that clutter my spare room is a testament to that. So is the half-written story, and the sporadic university study. To find out why I was this way, why the thought of putting work into something I am not naturally skilled at gave me such anxiety, I did what I always do when I am avoiding the actual work of writing: I hit the books.

I read essays by peers in my age group and consulted articles by professionals as to why young adults are anxious and effort-avoidant. Anything I could get my hands on that explained the terrible nature of “The Millennial”, a generation I reluctantly call myself a member of. What I discovered is that I was not alone, both in my fear of failure and the resulting reluctance to put in the effort to hone my skills. Thanks to social media platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest, we are presented with images of beautiful, eerily similar young women who are out easily living the #bestlife. Images of effortless perfection surround us. Most of this is the result of plastic surgery, filters and staging (Tolentino, 2019). However, all the audience sees is the image, not the sheer work that goes into that image, face and life. This is combined with being told we can do anything, being put under pressure to perform, and the belief that our whole life will collapse if we fail to live up to the lives we see others, including our parents, living (Twenge, 2011). It is no wonder that Millennials, even the older ones like me, are anxious and quickly give up on what they are not naturally good at. Why put effort into something that you are not inherently gifted at, when failing at it results in debt on top of the usual negative feelings of failure?

All the audience sees is the image, not the sheer work that goes into it.

I don’t have the answer to this situation. I don’t know if what I am doing is the right choice for me, and I may decide that it is not. I don’t know if I will ever make anything of my writing, it may always be a hobby that I pretend at. All I know is that the world is quickly changing and is not a pleasant or fair place. I know that I am more fortunate than others. I already have a job that pays the bills, and while I may never find work in the field that I love, at least I get the chance to pursue it. Perhaps I have to find a new way of living and develop an acceptance that other’s lives, J’s included, are not my life. That I do not see the truth behind the facade that others put up, or the way someone like J has earned their confidence. The effort and the mistakes, the suffering and learning are not mine to know. All I can do is worry about my life and put the effort in, and be truthful when I share the experience with others. If interviewing an Oncology nurse has taught me anything, it is that death does not wait for you to have the confidence to live your life.

So, I sit, and I write.

I refuse to let the anxiety of failure win this round. I do know that I will keep doing the work, I will continue to pretend at writing until it is not pretending anymore. How could I not? For inside every house cat is a lioness, she just has to grow.

*(name changed for privacy)

Sources

Armstrong-Coster, A. (2004). Living and dying with cancer. Cambridge University Press.

Tolentino, J. (2019, December 12). The Age of Instagram Face: How social media, FaceTune, and plastic surgery created a single, cyborgian look. The New Yorker.

Twenge, J. M. (2011). Generational differences in mental health: Are children and adolescents suffering more, or less? American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 81(4), 469–472.