All my life I have been afraid to try anything that I wasn't certain that I would be perfect at on the first try. If I tried and failed I would blame it on someone/something else. If it got too hard, I quit. It was that simple. If I wasn't the best immediately, there wasn't any point in me doing it. My parents tried to convince me otherwise, but I thought I knew better. As I've gotten older I've learned that no one is the best at everything on the first try, sometimes they might never be the best, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't do it. That I shouldn't do it.
Failure, to me, was a fatal error that would cause the world to come crashing down around me. I would get so concerned with all the ways that things could go wrong and what the possible results of that were that I never took the time to look at what could go right. Failure was a sign that I wasn't good enough and would never be good enough. It was an opportunity to open myself up to ridicule. There's a lot of things I never tried when I was younger, simply because I was afraid to fail.
I'm older now, and working on becoming wiser, and am pushing myself in ways that I never thought were possible before. I started a career in an industry I knew nothing about, and with the very real possibility that I might fail. I'm about 2 months in now and I'm so far outside of my comfort zone that there's no safety line long enough to reel me back in; I've never felt better in my life. I'm challenged every day and have small failures on a daily basis. But I'm learning to view those moments not as failures but as opportunities to learn and grow. I've learned that if I've never failed, then I've never really tried.
Albert Einstein once said, "Failure is Success in progress." I never was able to see it before, but every day I'm finding my failures and turning them into lessons instead of judgments. I'm not perfect, I never will be, and the only one who has ever expected that of me is myself. I would be lying if I said that I'm always looking on the bright side of my shortcomings, it's a work in progress just like everything else in life, but I work hard every day to be a better person than the day I was before and slowly but surely I move forward towards a better version of myself.
I'm not a "Failure" I'm just "In Progress".
