Failure is the hardest F word to handle

Failure is the most awful F word I can imagine being hit with. Being insulted or cussed out are minor. Being told I'm fat or ugly, fine. I can be called stupid or lazy- while they will get a response, to be called a failure is something far more hurtful. Maybe it's not just that we are "failing." Maybe it is has a much deeper root.

Failure is harder because it also reminds you of all the hopes and dreams you had. You are aware that you let yourself or someone else down- then add to that the reminder that you have to let go of the hope that you will get past this. Let go of the dream that everything will be alright in the end.
Failure is admitting you didn't succeed at something then having your hopes and dreams remind you that it was more than just the lack of success. You have to unclench your fist and face your heartache and loss.

According to the dictionary,
Failure: (N) 1. Lack of success. 2. the action or state of not functioning. Synonyms include: defeat, breaking down, collapse, malfunction, crash, and unfulfillment. I think the synonyms are spot on and just as telling about how failure feels as the definition itself. It's not just that we haven't succeeded. It's more like feeling like we are drowning in the deep end of the pool of failure. We can smell the defeat like chorine in the pool before the gush of breaking down fills our mouths. We gag and sputter on the malfunction that we are experiencing. We feel hopeless and like collapse is the only thing we can do. There is nothing to hold us up. We can't see past the waves or ripples of knowing we crashed and were not successful.

Knowing we have failed is like sitting on the train tracks, seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and wanting to sit and wait to see if it will run us over. We know it is coming. We know that we can't fix it. Nothing about failure is comfortable. Facing the fact that we are not successful and were unable to achieve whatever it was that we wanted is hard, add to it failing someone else and the person we face in the mirror seems so far from who we want to see. When people we care about fail us, we struggle with handling how to reconcile the perfect image in our heads of who they are to us. They become fallible and we are able to see them in the raw realness of humanity.

If you google "failure," you will find tons of  warm and fuzzy life affirming quotes about not letting it hold you back. Sonya Patterson says, "Don't let yesterday's failures and mistakes stop you from chasing success today." What if we stop treating failure as a the pool of defeat and start treating it like a book. Some moments of our life are not our entire life story. We acknowledge the failure; we grieve the defeat. Then, like the end of a particularly hard to understand story, we CLOSE THE BOOK. The lessons we learned from the failure remains with us. It becomes apart of our education of life. Ultimately, we allow ourselves to grow past our short comings. We stop mourning the mistakes and the lost dreams and we close the book. It's not a plot twist, it's a complete and ended book.

Failure hurts because we must face our mistakes and the loss of dreams that we had HOPED would occur after our "success." But sometimes, it's time to close the book and stop beating ourselves up over our crash, shelf it and open a new book.