You're Not a Failure if You Give Up On Something. No, Seriously.

PSST: Failure isn't necessarily bad; it gives you insight

Photo by Trần Long: https://www.pexels.com/photo/crying-asian-boy-lying-on-road-7743765/

I’m preparing for yet another move—this time to an overpriced mistake of an apartment that will buy me time to get my life in order before I leave for Bakersfield come May. The apartment is one of those joints where you’re met with a “chore list” and are penalized for exhaling. Case in point: I was fined $60 before I even rolled in because my cat is 18 pounds instead of the allotted 15.

Welcome home, kitty cat!

When I feel blue, I pull up snaps of my new home. I imagine padding up and down the stairs in socked feet. I picture myself fixing butternut squash chili in the 1940s kitchen. I see myself strolling. Taking up yoga again and all the things. Fantasies sustain me amidst the dread of moving into a home that resembles a totalitarian state.

But I digress.

I’ve achieved great things in my life—I’ve had two books published, I have a master’s degree (which means a lot to me even though it means nothing to the entire planet), I survived a terrifying childhood without turning into Ted Bundy, I had the fancy jobs with the bold-faced titles, I helped people. I’m no longer a raving asshole—though I still rave on occasion, but it’s not asshole in nature. It’s important to catalog what you’ve done, regardless of whether it’s minor or major because it reminds you that you did good, kid.

Your achievements are a reminder of what you’ve accomplished and the possibility of what else you can do. Yet, all too often, our great works are dwarfed by the minor cuts and major failures: the book that flopped, the work that dried up, the people helped who no longer return your phone calls, your inability to stroll and flounce.

It’s like reading one cruel comment amidst all the praise and feeling your bones break, one by one. But I promise you humans break fewer bones than heavy machinery do. You will not crack and crumble from the inside even if it feels like it. But what will happen is the ache and shame and tears—when they quietly subside—and how they make room for information.

My second book was an epic failure compared to my debut. I expected the slew of reviews, interview requests, thousands of emails and then…crickets. Tumbleweed barreling down the road and like that. At first, I was devastated because this book, while not a reflection of my current style, was far better more sophisticated than my memoir. From a technical perspective, I worked on it. From an emotional perspective, I reckoned with having predicted the manner and way in which my mother would die two years before I learned of her death.

After firing my agent for being frustrated that I’d never write “the big book,” I resigned to never publish again. Because who wants to hear the grand pause from new agents about the Bookscan numbers on my novel, and have you considered writing in a different genre, Felicia? There’s no doubt of your talent, but your…marketability. Have you considered TikTok?

Have you considered fucking off? Puta, please.

It’s been five years since my novel was published and it’s only recently where I’ve seriously started a new book. I write books at a glacial pace because the stakes are higher. The book has to mean something. It has to say the things no one story could even pronounce. It wasn’t until recently that I had a different, nuanced prospective on my epic failure:

I was proud of the book a handful of people read and the favorable reviews it received. While I was heartbroken that it hadn’t received the fanfare and Vanity Fair confetti of my debut, when cross-country book tours were still a thing in 2008, it took me three years to appreciate what I’d written — my bridge book.

My bridge book was the petulant teenager sneaking smokes and wine coolers and fucking strange boys wearing vinyl in their parent’s basement. It was the middle finger flipped at everything that had come before. It was the woman with a book of matches intent on burning it all to the ground. My bridge book rebelled against everything I’ve written while opening the door, a hair, a crack, to a fully-realized voice and style.

The novel that no one read was a test to see how far I could go.

Every writer has a bridge story, essay, or book, a turning point that marks a sharp departure from where they started. For years, I wrote fiction about suburban families doing bad things and the tenuous relationships between mothers and daughters. How children never break free from their familial history, often doomed to repeat it. While my themes haven’t changed all that much, how I write stories has seismically shifted. I’ve accepted I’m allergic to plot and linear writing.

The failure gave me key insights. It opened the door to refining my voice and style. It allowed me to experiment with story, character, and form. And it reminded me the reward isn’t in the sales and acclaim—the reward was having written the thing. Because many people talk a big game about writing a book, but how many write one much less a good one? How many people sacrifice the time and money to finish something that might not ever be read much less lauded?

The failure was a lesson on ego and identifying intrinsic and external rewards. What was it that I really wanted? Had I been writing books because I craved the fanfare and confetti, or had I been writing them because I had something to say? I had a story I wanted to put out into the world.

This titanic realization took the weight off writing a third book. And I promise you that weight was considerable because it feels like I’m starting over. Again. But the relief comes from not caring what people thing. If I want to write about serial killers and dead people, so be it. If I want to write an autofiction—consider it a melange of fiction and memoir (think Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy), so be it.

While my book failure was an initial tsunami of hurt, it revealed a new territory that could be navigated and conquered. It removed the burden I’d been carrying.

Lately, I’ve been thinking of burdens. The heavy bins of clothes I have to cart from home to home. The cat I have to negotiate into a carrier and hear his quiet sobs because he hates moving vehicles and how he curls up next to me the first night in a new space because of all the newness. I’m moving tomorrow and it’s not the logistics that concern me because I have a capable person, it’s the impermanence. It’s the why, Felicia, can’t you put down roots? What is it that you’re running from instead of to?

I look forward to my 40s home in Bakersfield and last night I started hatching my plans for it. But as soon as the joy flooded in it was subsumed by failure and doubt.

I haven’t worked in marketing for a while and I’m not sure when I’ll work again. I’m tired of reaching out to people and pitching and posturing, so I’ve decided to quit the hustle. It’s clear when people don’t reply to my emails that the work has dried up or has gone to someone younger and/or cheaper. Someone who talks about brand building as if it were a TikTok campaign. Or, it could be me. It could be my inability to compromise on what matters to me. It could be me refusing to sell myself for a bottom dollar or working with men who tokenize me. Or, possibly it can be a combination of all the above as we all contribute to our failure, albeit in varying degrees.

And although I have this clothing business and it makes money and I actually enjoy it, the income variability is stressful. I sat on the floor packing last night and panicked. What if no one buys the 500 pieces of clothing in my closet? What if I lose my 1940s house? I just cut the relationship with my pop so there’s no going to him (even though I probably wouldn’t have done it anyway, if I’m being honest). There is no safety net. There are no assurances. There is no you always find a way when all the ways seem to dry up. Of course, I proceeded to wallow on the failure that was my career until I slapped myself.

GET IT TOGETHER, FELICIA. Wallowing gives you nothing, it only thieves.

All I can control is how I show up, the clothes I source and how I treat my customers. All I can control is replying to emails on LinkedIn.

When it comes to this failure, I have to remind myself that I chose most of this. I chose not to work with asshole bros. I chose not to work for cheap. I chose not to get verbally abused by clients. I chose to only do the work that matters. And all those choices winnow down options—I knew this. Now, I’m left with the reckoning of the sum total of those choices. So, why wallow?

Often I think of this Beckett quote from The Unnameable: You must go on. I can’t go on, I go on. Also, in the 1983 story Worstward Ho – “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Beckett, the morose, the maestro of greatness and the advocate of failure—I feel a certain kinship with him, more so his crude, honest take on the world.

You can’t make the unworkable happen. You can’t avoid failure. And it’s normal to cry, be terrified, and lament your mounting losses. But then there’s the moving on.

I read this honest, brutal essay on suicide on Medium, penned by an actual professional and someone who also suffers from depression. He writes the one thing most people who endure depression can be on nodding terms with, and the one thing that terrifies those who don’t suffer from the illness:

“It never gets better; it gets human.”

Life is not neat and tidy and complete. It’s messy, raw, and parts incomplete. But what makes it beautiful, what moves us to climb over our colossal failures is our ability to keep going. To learn from the mistakes and the losses and the great, searing pain in our still-beating heart. Failure reminds us we’re human.