Confession: I Feel Better When I See You Fail

I know it sounds petty or bitter or even mean-spirited. But it's the honest truth: If you're a successful person, I'd rather see your failures than your successes.
Listen, it isn't that I don't enjoy your success, or don't want you to have it. I'm not sitting on the sidelines quietly hoping you'll trip over your shoelaces, land face first on the racetrack, and scrape some skin off your face. I don't HOPE for your failure.

But it does make me feel a lot better about myself.

The thing is, success stories simply don't inspire me like failure stories do. Don't get me wrong, it makes me happy and even proud to see people overcome obstacles! But let's be real here, not every obstacle gets to be overcome.

In fact, some obstacles can't be overcome. Sometimes you're faced with an insurmountable wall, and you have to give up (for now).
Others obstacles technically can be overcome, but maybe you're not in the right headspace for it, or you're just too tired, or maybe you even just get lazy or procrastinate and life gets the better of you. It happens.

The truth is we get knocked on our asses way more often than we jump over big hurdles, and those are the stories I want to hear.

I remember distinctly the first time I realized this. I had just discovered that Neil Gaiman, an author I had long loved and admired, had a Tumblr account. I was perusing it out of curiosity, and I saw this:
My favorite author said that. "I can do that with things I wrote this morning."

And for a moment I thought, that can't be right. This is Neil fucking Gaiman. He's a good writer. He writes things people all over the world love! He's successful. Sure, we're all our own worst critics, but he must take pride in even the work that needs improvement! Hell, I thought, I bet his worst writing is better than my best.

But slowly, I began to realize two

things.

One: Even great writers write

absolute garbage sometimes.

Two: Even writing that is good, that will resonate with lots of people, is sometimes hated, or at least doubted, by its creator.
Which lead me to more conclu- sions: That just because I write badly doesn't mean I'm a bad writer, and that just because I hate what I'm writing doesn't even necessarily mean I'm writing badly.

It was like I had unlocked some- thing - probably something the rest of the world knew, but I just couldn't seem to internalize: Some- times successful people suck at what they do. Or they doubt themselves, even when they're doing well. Or they struggle to get anything creative accomplished.

I need to remember that sometimes.

That's a huge part of why I continue to keep up with Neil Gaiman's posts on various online outlets, where his views on what it means to make art or be a writer are what keep me
wanting to write, and where he is upfront about his own perception of himself as an artist.

(When someone asked how he re- sponds to feeling discouraged, and he replied that he initially responds to the feeling by "announcing gloomily that I can no longer write, have never been any good at it, and anything I've managed to do so far in the writing business was prob- ably just sheer blind luck anyway," I felt that.)

That's also why I think George R.R. Martin and his long delays between books is a damn inspiration. I, too, hibernate as a writer for months on end, leaving the few people who read what I write wondering if I will ever write again or if indeed I've died and forgotten to announce it.

(When Martin asked Stephen King,
"You always get six pages [written a day]? You never get constipated? You never get up and go get the mail, and think 'Maybe I don't have any talent and should have been a plumber?" Oh boy I felt that.)

That's especially why Anne Lamott's Shitty First Drafts has been per- petually on my re-reading list, to be revisited at least once a year, ever since I first read it when I was in college.

(When Lamott described a first draft as "so long and incoherent and hideous that for the rest of the day I'd obsess about getting creamed by a car before I could write a decent second draft. I'd worry that people would read what I'd written and believe that the accident had really been a suicide, that I had panicked because my talent was waning and my mind was shot," good GOD I felt
that!)

The point is, I don't always want to know what you did well. I don't want to hear about child prodigies - they always make me wonder if it's too late for me. I don't want to hear about people who won against all odds, because I can't always see myself in the winners.

We all as creators and we're all creators, in some sense of the word - have a touch of impostor syndrome. We all see our failures amplified.

So tell me about yours.

Tell me about when the odds defeated you. Tell me about the days or weeks when you can't make anything.

Tell me about when executive dysfunction keeps you from picking
up a pen (/paintbrush/instrument/ tool of your choosing), or when a mental/creative block keeps your talents at bay for longer than you care to admit, or when you doubt those talents ever existed in the first place.

If you show me the things you've made that you're proud of, also show me the days you sat in the quiet, battling yourself, and won- dering if you ever should have tried to make anything in the first place.

Sometimes I think we all need to be reminded that our heroes are only human, and that those who find success do so by fumbling through failure upon failure. That is, for me at least, what keeps me capable of hoping to one day join them.
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