Sometimes it seems that no matter what you do, you fail. For years I have fought this inner sense of failure, all stemming at the root of it from a comment my father once made about me when I was a teenager. This inner sense of failure, of not being good enough, not being able to measure up no matter what you do or say, is incredibly binding once it latches on and takes seed.
You can do all that you can, go all out to try & achieve, go all out and work hours that others would think were humanly impossible or practical, and yet the sense of failure can still lurk or even literally manifest itself as actual failure and act as a heavy leaded milestone you just cannot shake off.
Words have incredible power. They truly do give life or death. They can tear down or build up. They have the power to bless and the power to curse. As a parent now myself, I am committed to never placing such a curse over my own children as was unwittingly and insensitively placed over me.
It can seem at the time to the speaker that the words spoken don't seem to bear much, but they can actually bite really hard and deep into the soul of the person hearing them. I myself know firsthand how much hurt can become attached to a flippant comment made by a parent or figure of authority and how, even many years later, it can resound in the inner ear of the mind when a situation triggers it being remembered.
Today I was busily working away at the computer working on the next video in a series I wanted to upload on the Household Logistics Channel. I had the video already to be exported to be uploaded and BAM! Things failed. The external hard drive that all the various individual video and photography clips were stored on, as well as the actual completed video itself, all in an instant became locked away and unable to be accessed and retrieved. FAILURE.
The hard drive which I had placed my complete trust in had failed me. No matter what I tried to do, or what my IT professional husband tried to do, the hard drive was not going to work and the outcome was systematic and total failure to launch. FAILURE.
Literally hours and hours of time, energy and resources are tied up in something that by all accounts has failed. Sometimes it truly seems that no matter what you do, you fail.
And so I have to wait. I have to wait to see if the hard drive will in fact allow for the files to be recovered from it, when it is seen by a recovery specialist on Monday. If not, I have lost literally a week's worth of work. I am currently gutted and frustrated beyond frustrated, because there is simply nothing I personally can do to rectify the situation. Sometimes it seems that no matter what you do, you really do fail.
Everyone fails at some point. For those of us who constantly seem to have repetitive experiences that reinforce our inner sense of failure, failure however little it might seem to others, has an extra harsh dimension to it. When you have heard yourself deemed a failure, as someone who is not going to amount to much, by an authority figure or figure of significance in your life, the ability to always bounce back from yet another failure may not always kick in as fast or as well as it would perhaps for someone else.
Some people do not have to battle an inner battle about a sense of failure like others do. They can let a failure wash off their back quite easily, compared to others of us who have scars and wounds related to failure already in existence.
Dealing with failure takes skill and inner strength. That inner strength has to be nurtured and it is best nurtured in our children when they are young. As parents we have a responsibility to be our child's best and first advocate. We have a responsibility to strengthen their inner selves, to build the foundation and platforms for their inner soul to bounce from when life hits them hard and fast. It takes thought and time to encourage our children, and it is time and effort worth investing in.
And so I wait and face as best I can Failure, this current sense of failure, head on.
I have to wait until early next week to hear the news about this latest current failure I am dealing with. I am trying not to spiral downward with the sense that yet again, this is something I tried to do and yet it was destined to fail, because reality and rationality say that there really is no such thing as a curse lurking over my external hard drive.
Still, I would like to go back in time if I could, and I would tell my teenage self that life is challenging, but no one, (not even I) will not amount to very little. I would like to tell that young person that somehow you will have the strength to pull yourself up time and time again, and you will ride out your failures, even if it takes a little longer sometimes than other people may take.
We ourselves can speak light into our dark places, and we can succeed even when we fail, because we can choose to step up once again, even when we feel yet again letdown and failure lurks yet again all too familiarly at our door. We can each succeed at journeying through our failure, no matter what anyone else may say, and we can journey through it well.
No comments:
Post a Comment