The time capsule is a collection of articles that were originally published at various times in the past, providing social commentary on a wide range of issues. The stories are prefaced by the author’s reflections drawing parallels to present day trends and developments.    

Author’s note: Let’s talk about failure! In a world that is more and more about instant gratification, going viral and keeping up appearances for the gram, it can be hard to keep things in perspective. We have been conditioned to believe that hard work is directly proportional to success, and if you haven’t attained said success yet then all you have to do is grind harder. 

Obviously, if you take a look around the Oscar-worthy apocalypse now episode that is our post-COVID world, it should be clear that that narrative can be thrown out the window. Oftentimes the hardest working people are the ones struggling to merely survive everyday, and many of us are frankly just trying to keep treading water and moving forward as best as we can.

Re-reading my reflections from seven years ago when I had clearly gone through a tough year, was the refreshing reminder I needed this week that failure and success are equally valuable. While it can be hard to take a step back when you’re in the middle of a difficult season, I hope that we can find ways to consistently reframe our failures into not only lessons, but also the necessary paths we must journey into a future that is yet unwritten. 

As I begin to reflect on another year come and gone, I always inevitably find myself placing my experiences into two categories: a success list and a failure list. Although it usually seems like common sense what falls into which list, this time around I’ve been having difficulty accepting my method of assessment.

To the naked eye, this has been a year of many failures, or at least many more than is considered normal for me. As a person who generally ends up getting what I want, be it through hard work, divine favor, good connections, or just dumb luck; this year has served as a giant slice of reality pie. My relationship fell apart, I was broke and unemployed for a long stretch, and I spent a lot of the time generally confused about how I ended up in that space and how on earth I was going to get out of it. Despite all this, I can say with clear conviction that this has been one of the best years of my life.

To figure out why my usual metrics were failing me, I had to delve a little bit deeper to see how I had arrived at the weird conclusion that I had somehow come out on top. I hadn’t traveled as much as I did last year, I definitely didn’t make as much money as I did last year, and I felt generally more stressed and tired than usual. So how could it be that life felt so promising and exciting?

I realize now that the problem lay in my absolute measure of success versus failure. More often than not, what on the surface looks and smells like failure, is actually success in disguise awaiting to be reborn. I know I tend to harp on and on about how important it is to take the lessons from a bad situation, but the truth is you have to go beyond that even. Life isn’t about success and failure so much as it is about opportunity and promise.

Out of a broken relationship, you can choose to see only a failure to make it work with someone you loved; or rather see an opportunity to emerge from a situation you were never meant to be in with the promise that the right person is still out there waiting for you. Out of a lost job, you can choose to see only the failure to figure out how to play the game and keep up in the never-ending rat race; or rather see an opportunity to explore other avenues of employment with the promise of new challenges and professional experiences.

So-called failure shouldn’t be feared so much as celebrated, because out of it comes something just as valuable as the pat-yourself-on-the-back positivity that comes from doing well - that is the drive to push forward and forge new ground. The power of potential is only limited by the depth of your dreams, so forget about the arbitrary measure of success versus failure and get to dreaming, get to failing, get to bouncing back, and get to growing.

The original post was published on christinekwrites.com

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