Learning to Fail

I keep thinking about the phrase “What do you want to be when you grow-up?” Not “What do you want to do?” or “What jobs sound fun?”, but “What do you want to be?”. Be, as if to imply what we do for a living equates to who we are as people. Teaching us as children our jobs will define the people we become. Maybe that’s why I feel paralyzed and lost since I graduated college. Maybe that’s why I can’t look at job listings or graduate school applications without spiraling into anxiety attacks. Maybe that’s why I don’t know who I am anymore. For over a decade I defined myself as a student, but now without a quick definition, I’m struggling to see my own worth. I work from home as an insuring clerk at a mortgage company, a job I promised myself would not extend past graduation. The one Masters of Social Work program I applied to, waitlisted me. All the while, like a ringing in my ear, that question buzzes, “What do you want to be?”

I play a cruel game with myself. When an opportunity appears, I determine the worst-case scenario, decide I will inevitably fail, and talk myself out of it before I try. I’ve gotten really good at winning this game, yet I constantly feel like I’m losing. I am trying to decipher when my fear of failure became so debilitating. I think it stems from mentally linking who I am with what I do. If I fail trying, I feel that I am a failure. I’m not accepted into a graduate program or working an interesting job fresh out of college, so I feel I am worthless. Entangling our worth with external factors, not only damages our relationships with ourselves, but it damages our ability to take risks. Failure becomes too loaded, the stakes too high, so we settle, and we self-loathe. What if we disassociated our jobs from who we are? What if we learned to see ourselves as whole individuals worthy of love and respect not because of what we do, but because of our spirits, perspectives, and values? I suspect what we do and the risks we take, will become expressions of self-love rather than desperate attempts to prove our worth.

I am still working out what I want to do for a living, the path is more convoluted and murkier than anyone let on. However, I think I am starting to realize what I want to be. I want to be creative, kind, and vulnerable. I want to be loving, funny, and passionate. I want to be happy with who I am. I am grappling with my fears daily, they are vicious and overwhelming, but I know they stem from a lie. My job or grades or resume do not define who I am. Quite the contrary, who I am will define what I do. I am still afraid, yet I want to fail, and I want to know all it means about me is I was brave enough to try.