The Freedom that Comes From Being a Failure

In the past, I have written about the project that I was a part of called the Community of Mary, Mother of the Redeemer.  As of last Thursday, I am no longer part of CMMR.  It still exists, just without me (and other core members).  I would love to be able to say that I have all the confidence in the world that CMMR will grow and flourish, but that would be a lie.  I think the far more likely outcome is that CMMR is heading for a fiery crash of one of a couple different sorts.  And part of me thinks that flourishing, at least of the public sort, would be the worst possible outcome for all concerned.

In any event, my participation in CMMR is over, and thus one could say it was a failure.  In fact, I would definitely say it was a failure.  There are some people who want to relativize failure, to say something along the lines of "well, it wasn't a failure because I learned from the experience."  It is good to learn from experiences, to be sure, but that doesn't make them not failures.  I don't think we should be afraid of failure, and failures.

I've had some fairly high profile failures in my life, at least high profile in the context of the narrow world of me and my life.  I essentially flunked out of Northwestern.  I charged all the way in to becoming a Roman Catholic priest, and then charged all the way back out again.  I was rather pointedly not asked back for my first lawyer job.  I've never had much in the way of a permanent romantic relationship.  Those were, and are, failures.  This most recent experience too is a failure, and I wouldn't really say that it even comes close to those others in terms of impact on me.  But it nevertheless was a failure. 

And while it is true that I have learned some concrete things from each of those experiences, they pale in comparison to the meta-lesson of all of them, which is that failure is survivable.  No matter how catastrophic the failure feels at the moment, it will pass, and it will be OK.  Which is not to say you forget it, not to say that it doesn't suck in the moment, not to say that you won't look back on it with regret or disappointment.  It just means that you can, and probably will, come to the other side standing.

This fact is, I think, not obvious or intuitive, but something you have to learn.  And, like many painful but important lessons, it can only be learned by going through it and realizing your degree of resiliency at the end of the line.  Telling someone that things will get better is better than nothing, but not much more than that, at least in my book.  Nothing substitutes for going through the concrete experience of coming out of the other side.  Until you pick yourself up, I don't think you can really know whether you can.

That process--falling down, rising up, and then eventually finding yourself in the sunny skies--also teaches you to hold on loosely successes just as much as failures.  For pretty much every one of the notable failures in my life, there are corresponding successes.  Yes, I flunked out of Northwestern, but I also graduated from Penn Law with honors eight years later.  Yes, I am single, but (if you want to consider this a success) I have managed to assemble an absolutely incredible, warm, joyful array of friends with whom I am genuinely close.  These are wonderful things, and they can and should be enjoyed for what they are.  But they cannot and should not be held so tightly that they are relied upon as the basis of identity.

The problem with holding onto successes too much is that it gives fuel to the notion that our value is based on our successes.  It's very easy, especially if we have achieved some successes, to think that we are our successes.  This leads to a paranoia about failure, or maybe more accurately the end of the successes.  Because, now it is not just no longer having the success anymore (which is sub-optimal, since again successes are good), but the fear that the end of the successes is the end of our value as a person.  Failure becomes existential.  This is certainly not unique to our culture, but our culture tends to treat failure almost like a kind of disease, something that we are afraid will spread.  That's why, I think, we tend to default to rationalizing away failure.  We do that because we think that admitting that something is a failure is to say something about who we are as person on a fundamental level.  It's a way of insisting we are still valuable, whole persons notwithstanding whatever it was that happened recently.  

But I don't want to play that game at all.  Of course we are still valuable whole people; that isn't, and can never be, in question, no matter what has happened.  We don't need to come up with a story to explain to the abstract hypothetical judge of such things why this is still the case, and offering such an explanation justifies, if only in our own minds, that losing that status is a possibility.  Talking honestly about failures is a way of declaring your own intrinsic worth.  It is a way of dispelling that existential cloud that too often surrounds failure.

This is, in part, why the Book of Job is so awesome and revolutionary.  Job's "friends" are the voices that try to construct ostensibly "helpful" explanations for tragedy and failure, all of which ultimately make the person who has suffered the pain feel worse.  Job is a hero because Job refuses to internalize these narratives.  He is defiant in insisting on his own dignity even in the midst of his pain, so much so that in the end he is willing to stand before God and ask for an account.  "This is not about me, this doesn't change who I am" is Job's fundamental objection to the narratives offered by his discussion partners, one that God ultimately validates out of the whirlwind.

All of that is a bit ramble-y, I know, but it has been on my mind in the last few days.  Something I have been involved with has failed, rather spectacularly actually.  It's a bummer, but it has happened before and will happen again.  It's not about me; it doesn't change who I am.  And that's a message of freedom, I think.    

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