When failure becomes unforgivable, art becomes safe and lifeless.
When you first get started at writing, what excites you, what energizes you, is this eruption of thoughts that you desperately try to pluck from the air and put down on the page before they get away. What comes from those first endeavors is a remarkable collection of failings. In those poor attempts, you forgive yourself for their weaknesses, for their inadequacies, ones that you don’t dare to hold up to the light or in comparison with other real writers. The reason you don’t is quite simple: you’re expecting to fail. The beautiful stabs in the dark that you make are wrong turns, yes, but they’re also moving you forward in anticipation of one of them leading you somewhere. The place in which you rest, where you put yourself so gently, ever so softly, down onto the page is one of failure.
Years of this go without any, so much as recognition or headway towards anything great, and again you resolve to yourself that it is prudent, a measure one who is learning is expected to fall from. Then one day something happens. You have convinced yourself that you are now a writer. Suddenly, your license to fail, to make miserable work, is revoked. Now all must be amazing. Each sentence needs to glide from one to another. The characters must be dynamic and the story, oh boy, the story must be life-changing. It can’t just be good. It must be something nobody else has written before, and written in a new, fresh style that establishes you as one of the greats.
Life is like this too. Not just in writing, but most everything. As a child, that failure is seen as the first step toward growth. Modern society, with its insistence on documenting your every breath, tends to stifle that early on in teenagers. They are seen as adults, who now must not make any mistakes, because if they do, it will follow them for the rest of their days. It will mark them, define them. We no longer extend the grace of a child to them, because they’ve been given enough chances at failure that they should cast aside the desire to take risks, to bridge the gap between their ability and their potential. The flame goes out, and the safe choices are made as if those years, while formable, are defining times, which they absolutely are not.
Like the writers I know who constantly question the quality of their work, the validity of their voice, or their place in literature, young people are finding themselves more and more out of place.
When I was their age, we hid in the shadows of the day. Our parents had no clue what we were up to, since there was no way of tracking our location. We certainly didn’t digitally document our escapades, whether incriminating or acts of kindness. Without the scrutiny of social media, we freely made mistakes. From the ones we learned from, we grow, and from the ones we did not learn from, we remedied simply with a shrug, because of so much done, most of it is forgotten.
I have shoeboxes filled with thousands of poems. Each year, the ones I’m proud of or believe have any merit dwindle smaller and smaller. But anytime I spend a whole day writing a single poem, I am reminded of the sea of words I’ve already ventured through. They live with me, my wonderful failed children. No matter how good the single poem of the day is, though, it is never as fulfilling as the prolific rush of mediocrity. Starting off a piece knowing where I’m going, only to get pushed off the path by a rogue idea, happens less and less. The time I spend to coax out the thoughts that hide behind fears and stresses of the day is less and less.
The return to that willingness to fail is now a goal of mine. I want to get back to having the mindset of someone who, unstifled by doubts and plans, sees only the first few words ahead of them. Life as well should be like that. Instead of living years removed, backwards or forwards, the minutes, the seconds, that brevity of life is what is important and where the great wondrous things come from.
I want to get back to having the mindset of someone who, unstifled by doubts and plans, sees only the first few words ahead of them.
The greater danger of a society where there is no place to fail or grow is not just one where kids are too scared to try new things, to get out of their comfort zone, or dare to be something other than what is safe. Even worse than that is a society that is so ready to brand an offender with a mark so deep and so permanent that the holder feels no reason to seek redemption. They wear that mark with a sickening pride that attracts others, far more worthy of the condemnation. In those dark communities of now-seeming scummy compatriots, the unforgiven are given the acceptance they crave. The festering resentment, like a seed of ruin, is buried deep in the dark, dark, muddy ground of mostly older, truly vile people who incite more than just disappointment. They ferment anger.
As we stop reaching for a place, both in creating and living, that challenges us to be better or to make better art, we stunt our emotional and artistic growth. When there are fewer and fewer peers and mentors who accept our mistakes and are willing to embrace them as steps toward the skill of writing or living, we end up in a world of sterile and obsolete expression.
What sets us apart from anyone or anything is that our unique voice is composed of our individual experiences: both positive and negative, both successes and failures. Only we can tell the stories that we have inside of us.
