How I Failed At Failing
In these short weekly notes, you’ll find:
The Well—something I’ve learned about living wildly AND well
The Wild—words from extraordinary minds who struggled with mental health too
The Way—one small experiment for you to try
The Well
Last Friday, I failed to send you a Stark Raving Sane newsletter. This week I'm going to tell you how I failed at failing.
Here's what happened: The Asylum Inner Circle was filling up with the Founding Keyholders, and I found myself overwhelmed with gratitude and excitement, but also with technical breakdowns, live video chats, the kind of work that requires immediate presence rather than scheduled output. The newsletter—this newsletter—didn't get written. Friday came and went. The guilt came too, but it stayed.
And here's where I failed the second time.
I didn't think, "This week, the SRS newsletter is what I'm choosing to let go of, and that's a valid choice."
Instead, I spent the day convinced I was letting you down. That I'd broken some sacred contract of consistency. That the value I desperately want to give you was leaking out through the gap where a newsletter should have been.
But here's what was really happening underneath all of that, the thing I didn't want to look in the proverbial eye:
The missed newsletter was proof.
Proof that there is a point at which I will fail. A point at which I genuinely cannot do everything I've told the world—and more terrifyingly, myself—that I'm going to do. I walked into a wall in the dark, and if there's a wall here, there are walls everywhere. Walls I haven't hit yet. Walls I've been pretending don't exist by running fast enough not to see them in the blur.
The real fear wasn't "I didn't send a newsletter." The real fear was: What else am I promising that I cannot actually deliver? And when will I find out?
If a friend had come to me with this, I would have said: "You didn't fail. You chose. The problem is you chose it after it happened, so it felt like a defeat instead of a decision. Next time, choose it before. Make failure one of the options on the table—a dignified option, with a chair and a teacup—not the terrible thing that happens when you've exhausted all the acceptable ones."
This week, I'm going to try failing at something on purpose. Just not this newsletter;).
The Wild
"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited." - Sylvia Plath
"I am a collection of dismantled almosts." - Anne Sexton
The Way
This week, let's look at everything we're carrying. Really look. Write it all out, on paper, with your own hands. Let's acknowledge that we cannot hold all of it forever. And let's decide now—before we drop something and shatter it—what we're willing to set down gently. Not because we don't care. But because we do.
And, as always, if you find it difficult to take this time for yourself (as I often do), do it for Anne.
Do it for Sylvia.
