I said I’d be honest.
All my life and I do mean all my life since I left school, I have been afraid of trying to do something in case I failed. The fear of failure was so big that I’d avoid doing anything at all that I wasn’t guaranteed to succeed at.
I didn’t do much for a lot of years. I avoided being ambitious. I avoided having aspirations. I excused being good at things as accidental and attributed any success fiercely to other people. I simply didn’t want to concede that being good at something meant you should try at it and work at it – until you inevitably hit the wall where you weren’t any good at it any more compared to the experts around you and you were forced to admit failure.
I have spent my entire life avoiding hitting that wall. From giving up playing the flute despite being good, to refusing to long distance run despite enjoying it, to fluffing up javelin throwing once at a County Games and refusing to pick the damn thing up again – the avoidance started early and it just never got challenged because I was clever and hid it.
Actually, I didn’t consciously hide it. I didn’t know there was an issue. It’s carried on from where it started in primary school into my 20′s and then my 30′s. I quit jobs I shouldn’t have, I gave up trying on friendships I shouldn’t have, I avoided forming friendships that I really should have had the balls to stick with.
I have no idea where this comes from. I was an A/B grade student in top sets for everything bar science that I sucked at. I was awkward sportswise but could whack a ball with a rounders bat. I could read faster than anyone I knew. Good things. Positive things.
Things I never focused on.
A few weeks ago I failed at something. It wasn’t so bad. With the help of two girls, I kind of got my head around it and where initially I beat myself up about it, I managed to stop, turn it around and understand that in that case trying really did count for something and that even in failing I’d achieved something.
Last week I accepted my body had simply had enough and was giving up on me whether I liked it or not. It took 48 hours of horribleness for me to understand but eventually I did – it wasn’t a failure to not go to work, it simply needed to happen, and there was no choice.
This Sunday I’m riding 40km. 10 days ago I couldn’t stand up for longer than 60 seconds and getting to the loo required help. My fingers hurt. My wrists hurt. My elbows hurt. I’m probably going to get a migraine this evening and tomorrow and the next day and the next. I’m going to ride my bike because I like riding my bike. For no other reason. Because it makes me feel better. Because I’d rather feel pain I’d earned and earned well.
But most of all because I don’t believe in not trying any more. I don’t believe in being scared of failing. I don’t believe failing is a bad thing any more. It just is. I don’t believe in beating myself up for it, I don’t believe in being embarrassed about it.
My body is entirely out of my control right now. It’s not my fault it’s broken. I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t choose anything. But a life lived avoiding is a life lived drifting, never making choices, never fighting back, never allowing passion and belief to colour anything, never permitting dreams to be dreamt and chances to be taken.
I don’t want to live my life with it being dictated by my body and its predictabilities. But in realising that, I also have to grown the hell up and accept I have to take responsibility for my mind too. I musn’t let my fear of failure stop me doing anything any more.
Life is too damn short.
Hello. This is a brilliant, wonderful post, and I think you should print it off and stick it somewhere in your house so you can read it all the time. I never realised that you’d been so poorly, and yet you finished that course today and at the end looked like you could go round again! I know how it feels to never start something in case you might fail or not be as great as you’d hoped. Once you realise that it’s just stopping you living the life you might live, you can begin a new life. One that involves staring yourself in the face and daring to do more than you’d imagine possible. You are definitely in that new life now. Even I know it, and I have only just had the pleasure of meeting you. Well done on today’s success, and on successes (and failures, we must have those too!) to come. You’re an inspiration.