Failures, mistakes, and grievous errors

A look back at 2023

Don’t let the title fool you. This isn’t a pity session, it’s a celebration.

2023 had moments of suffering and agony, deliveries of weirdness (both the itchy kind and the delightful kind), and plenty of intensity in forms of issues and obstacles and challenges and change. Oh my! Life, in other words, continued to be life. Unpredictable. Mundane. Terrifying.

And absolutely worth being here for every single minute.

It was a full year. Some things changed and some things stayed the same. I tried a lot of things and I failed in many.

And this is me realizing that even when I fail, I move forward.

Even when I make mistakes, I benefit — or, at the very least, I don’t die.

Even when I make grievous errors — the kind I think about when I can’t sleep; grievous not because they caused an enormity of suffering but because they carry a tinge of shame or horror that I can’t shake, so I re-live and regret these errors with an intensity wildly disproportionate to their actual measurable effect on my life, or anyone else’s — I still get to sleep eventually, and wake up, and in the morning light there’s nothing grievous at all. Just me, figuring it out as I go.

So I’m here to celebrate the absolute triumph of continual failure. If you’re in the same boat, I tip my hat to you. We are pals and partners.

Here’s a short list:

I failed at reaching most of my goals.

I didn’t run or read or learn or travel or save as much or as often as I wanted, not even close. I didn’t get organized. I didn’t move us from our too-small apartment to an actual house (a pipe dream, I knew, but I still put it on my 2023 goals). We will continue being a little crowded and yelling about bathroom usage and tripping over stuff and life will go on. I didn’t solve all the problems I set out to solve or get over all the things I planned to get over. Maybe some of those things need to hang with me a little longer. Some of the problems disappeared anyway. And other things — burdens, issues, stresses that I hadn’t even thought of tackling — dropped to the wayside without any effort on my part.

I failed at parenting.

I failed at many things I wanted to do as a parent, wanted to give the kids, how I hoped to grow and be better in certain aspects of parenting. And yet: the kids are okay. How I am as a person is how I am as parent. I can’t be better or kinder or wiser or whatever as a parent than I am as a person. I’m working hard on myself, all the time, and that has to be enough. Somehow, it seems to be.

We muddle along, we laugh, we get on each other’s nerves, we’re grateful, we’re crabby, we have disagreements, we work it out, we share our joys, and sometimes we all end up sitting around the table, eating dinner at the same time. All this, despite my many failures. WHAT DO YOU KNOW.

I failed at dating.

I tried a few times and I gave up quickly. I thought 2023 would be the year I’d moved on emotionally enough to give it a go. And… it was.

My emotional state wasn’t the problem; my lack of interest was. I didn’t meet anyone with more appeal than a good book or a conversation with a friend. I got tired of looking, so I quit. Will I try again? Sure. Will you hear about it? Oh, definitely.

I failed at friendship.

There were so many times I wasn’t there the way I wanted to be. Didn’t ask for help and support when I needed it. Didn’t have as much to offer as I hoped. So many times when life was too busy and days or weeks went by, when I dropped the ball and let it roll into the gutter and waved half-heartedly at it, like: You gonna get that?

And, miracle of miracles — I am still loved! Loved, appreciated, and supported by people I respect and admire and love. So either I really lucked out on friends (I did) or friendship goes deeper than my failures (it does).

I failed at writing.

I wrote a lot, and I didn’t write a lot.

I had weeks of consistency and weeks, months, of not even glancing at anything outside of work. And yet, I still managed to push out a couple dozen blog posts and a motley assortment of newsletters and thousands of words in notes and drafts and outlines. I didn’t write a book but I wrote parts of a book. I didn’t publish daily or weekly or even monthly but I threw my fingers around on the keyboard often enough to not forget how, and here I am, back at it.

I had some successes this year, too. Some were mountains I climbed, but most were puddles I managed to jump over. I am proud of myself for both. It’s not the bigness of the goal, after all. It’s the effort you have to put in. Some of those puddle-jumping moments were more difficult than the steepest mountain moments, just because other things were demanding all I had, so giving anything was a huge effort.

I hope you’re proud of yourself, too. If you look back and see failures, I hope you keep them in context. Consider this: the earth did a full spin around the sun and we didn’t fall off, not even once.

Happy new year! Let’s make more mistakes!