Thoughts on failure

D and I have been discussing failure lately. It started with our discussion of expat life the Monday of our last date. I've told you what caused me to get depressed at that conversation, but it took a couple of days before I was able to explain it to D in a letter. When I did -- when I explained that I thought I'd be more comfortable at the table of Sister Failure than dining with some of the expat executives she described -- she tried to talk me out of it with remarks in the vein of "There, there, Hosea, you're not a failure." That told me that she really hadn't heard what I was trying to say, so I spent a little time trying to figure out what I really was trying to say. I came up with something close to the following.
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It is quite late, but I have been sitting thumbing through the latest Time Magazine. The cover article is about Amy Chua's new book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and I found myself thinking about Sister Failure as I read it.

Sometimes I wonder whether you hear my remarks about Sister Failure in quite the same tone of voice that I have in my head when I write them. Maybe not quite, because it seems like you try to talk me out of seeing myself in some kind of relation or connection with "her," and yet somehow I think that if you heard my thoughts the way I meant them you might not feel like you had to. I'm not quite sure: "Sister Failure" is a conceit, after all, that I made up pretty recently; and my thoughts on "her" are maybe somewhat confused and contradictory. What I do not feel is that the term "failure" in this context is any kind of reproach. I'm not quite sure I can articulate what I feel instead, but I think there are several levels.

The easiest level to describe is the one where "success" and "failure" describe incomes. That is, after all, one common way of using the words, at least in this country, and I think we both have a pretty good idea of what they mean. "Success" (in America, with respect to incomes) refers to an income of a certain size or larger, that is deployed in such a way as to buy a certain level of material wealth. I don't think it is necessarily a happy way to live, and I don't expect ever to live that way. Partly I don't have that kind of an income now. And once I am divorced, I may take it into my head to look for work somewhere else, somewhere exciting, doing whatever I can find there. If I make that kind of a move -- meaning a move for the sake of the new place, not for the sake of a job -- my income is likely to drop. And if I can momentarily stretch the meaning of "failure" to cover everything that is not "success" ... well, that will end up including me just because I'll never make it inside that particular income bracket. I don't lose any sleep over that fact, though -- not a single wink -- because I would have no idea what to do with that kind of money if I had it.

Another data point surfaces when I think about the people who were my friends in college. Oddly, they were not the other high achievers in my class. (My academic record was a little nuts.) I don't mean that any of them was stupid -- I'm not sure we had a lot of stupid people at my college. But my friends were a little aimless, like I was; plugging along but not sure why, or where they were headed. They were a different group altogether from the confident, driven students who knew what they wanted to do, who systematically applied to law schools or graduate schools in their senior years, and who tended (through dedication and focus) to get most of the top spots in the class. I often felt that I ought to be more like these people, but on the other hand I felt kind of intimidated by them. Any one of them could give an account of himself better than I could. The things they knew, they seemed to know more deeply, while my knowledge was a huge nest of bright-and-shiny tidbits collected from all over the place. And if I had had to answer the question, "Which of the students in your graduating class are the natural successes?" I would certainly have picked them ... even if that meant not picking myself.

It's truly odd, because there is a part of me that feels that it would be invigorating to be ambitious and challenged, a part of me that is eager to go out and pit strength against strength. I wrote you a lot about that when you mentioned that of course you would like to be a great teacher ... in retrospect I think I must have written a lot more than anyone could have wanted to read. And in fact one dimension of our friendship for each other, yours and mine, runs exactly through our delight in each other's strengths.

But side by side with that ambition I have always felt this persistent timidity, this fear. Indeed, in some ways I think that success smells to me something like fear, which is really peculiar. Isn't success supposed to smell sweet? But somehow success (for me) carries with itself the threat of radical impermanence, like I am only an inch away from not being good enough so I have to scramble harder and ever harder to scoot away from the edge of that cliff. In this context, failure is actually liberating. An acceptance of failure means that I don't have to be wound up tight all the time. It's a fair question to wonder how, with all that fear of not being good enough for strong, driven, motivated people, I was ever able to make myself vulnerable to you. I think the answer is twofold. First, I had known you for so long as a friend of Wife's that you already felt fairly safe to me. Second, you had already taken the huge risk of making yourself way more vulnerable to me first. I would like to think that I would have had the courage to pursue you otherwise, but ... well in all those years I didn't do it, did I? So I don't have anything to congratulate myself on here.

It's also a simple fact that we all fail many times in life. I surely learned this in my marriage if nowhere else, because I failed over and over and over again. Not only the little, tactical goals failed, but most of the big ones too. That sounds bleak, but it prepared me for all the times as a parent when I wanted with all my heart to achieve A, and all I could get was B or C. By the time we had kids and that started to happen, I was on the way to learning that in such a case it is best to settle for what is possible and move on. A big reason that I don't react even worse than I do when communication breaks down between you and me is that I have already experienced worse breakdowns so many times that I have started to learn how to deal with it. "Started" ... I don't claim expertise. But I had to smile very softly to myself when you told me that my depression placed huge demands on you, because it meant that I was asking you to fail over and over again in our relationship. The smile was just because I took my own failure towards you very much as a matter of course. So it seemed like no big deal to me for it to go two directions.

And of course this is why we all need forgiveness. Nobody ever has to forgive success. But we have to be able to forgive each other over and over because we are always failing each other, always disappointing each other. It seems like all the time -- well OK, that's an exaggeration, but let's say "not too infrequently" -- that I misstep badly in our relationship or misstate something in a letter and have to ask your forgiveness. You step more gracefully than I do, so you don't misstep as often; but I can only hope that I am as willing to forgive if the occasion ever arises. I'm sure the reason God asks us to forgive each other is that He has a better understanding than we ever could of just how often we need it ourselves.