Turn failure upside down

I've never really failed. I mean horrendously f'd up. I haven't been so broken-hearted that I couldn't wake up the next day or month. I haven't put all my effort into one project to then watch it blow up in my face. I've never gotten an F (well, there was a brief phase of slacking off in college, but that's for another blog). I've lived my life on the safe side, all the while eyeing and envying those who can risk it all for the sake of something better.

I've always been an avid reader. Since I could, I've had a book in my hand. And that is any type of book, fiction, non-fiction, rom-com, NY Magazine... but the one thing I've always been drawn to in stories is the idea of redemption. A character has a fatal flaw, a tragic error, or they risk it all to move for love, and then don't do it correctly. They fail at what they set out to do, or their personality was never going to let them do what they thought they should do. Whatever it is, the notion that we can learn from our mistakes, and instead turn those mistakes into learning experiences is so very interesting.

My brother has a learning disability. We found this out after my Mom harassed the schools to get him tested. She knew he was fine, but something wasn't necessarily "right". After she got her way, and we found out that he did indeed have something to overcome, the hard part set in. How would he catch up to reading and writing? Would he always want and need extra-help hours? But Jason took this in stride. I am not saying it has been easy, for him especially, but he is someone who has taken a challenge, or something that could be viewed as a failure, and turned it into his strongest trait. He has an ability to understand how he learns, how he adapts, and he can apply these skills to everything he does in life.

When I hated my job in 2009 ( I mean, HATED), I called Jason. In my whole life, I had never felt like a failure before and I had no idea how to cope with this. But, Jason knew. He told me that I needed to improve on my outlook, that I needed to take whatever lessons I could from this place and learn from it. And I did. I learned that when I don't like what I am doing, I slack off. I learned that I could use an attitude adjustment from time to time... all very valuable things to know about myself.

Failure is scary, which is why most of us never really risk it. It is scary because well, it might not work. Will people make fun of us? Will we be judged? Did we make a mistake? But this isn't the way to look at failure and over the past year I've seen that the ability to fail gracefully, learn from it, change, adapt, and move on is one of the most important lessons life can give us.