I’m currently in month 6 of a little series in my life that I just now named ‘reframing my view of failure’.
I literally just came up with that now—but it’s fine 😉
Looking at failure through a different lens has definitely been the lesson for me since turning 36 last July—things happened in 2025 that I won’t speak of here (but that I did speak of in this other blog I wrote recently!), but my entire view of what makes up a successful life has shifted in a way that simply fits real life a little better than my old viewpoint did.
It’s easy to lose sight in stressful moments of the fact that your life is not just that one moment—it is literally made up of millions of moments—and I think we all understand at this point that life will have its highs and lows. But it is really easy to lose sight of the fact that our life is like a movie—the beauty being in the whole with all its highs and lows—when we’re going through that stressful time.
Stress can cause our view to really narrow (think the fight/flight/freeze response) and we can lose sight really easily of the bigger picture.
But the fact is one moment of failure is not definitive. It’s what you do during and after that failure that makes a huge difference.
Superliminal and ‘flying by the instruments’
I have already mentioned Superliminal in several other blogs, but I’ll do it here too because I just love the premise for this game so much.
In the game, you play as someone who has come to a sleep clinic to undergo a special type of dream therapy. The player supposedly has come there to deal with some sort of life situation where they can’t seem to gain control or can’t seem to move forward.
The game gets more and more confusing as you progress further along—in fact, if often doesn’t feel like progress at all. You are frequently scolded by a robotic voice throughout for ‘doing the wrong thing’—even though ‘the wrong thing’ is never explicitly defined.
You just know you’re doing it wrong—and you seem to keep going in circles over and over and over again and not going anywhere.
And yet, you also have access to these recordings from a ‘doctor’ (who has a very soothing, Mr. Rogers-esque voice) who provides sporadic, but also vague encouragement throughout.
But my thought was ‘this is all you have to hang on to here’. In the midst of the confusion, the criticism and the panic (wondering if you’ll ever actually wake up or be stuck in the dream state forever… and wondering if you have failed big time…)—there is this little tiny nugget of encouragement and hope. And that is what you need to cling to.
Because the key, you learn at the end of the game, is to simply change your perspective and keep going, despite how wrong you’re told you are—aka resilience.
“But, more often than not, the problem is not that the problems we face can’t be solved, The problem is that we become so afraid of failure that we refuse to see our problems from a new perspective and so we do the same things again and again and again. And therein of course, we find exactly the failure we were looking for.”
I recall one day in 2018 when living in France where I was arguing with my husband.
And these were never just little spit-spats. These were long affairs in which he would usually take off, sometimes for days at a time—leaving me with no resolution and no reassurance.
I would often blame myself for these arguments (and he would also blame me, which didn’t help any)—so any time anything went wrong, it always felt like a personal failure. And a failure of a wife, I thought, doesn’t deserve to have a good day.
And so I would literally refuse to be happy until things were resolved between us.
But one day something caught my eye that actually managed to cut through the fog a bit. It was an article from John Piper (I was a Christian at the time) that talked about how pilots will ‘fly by their instruments’ when visibility is severely limited. I thought about how terrifying it would be to be piloting an aircraft full of passengers when you can’t even see straight—but they have their dials and knobs and sensors on their dashboard that actually give them all the information they need.
It may just require you to do something that doesn’t seem right instinctively—but you need to trust those instruments above your own senses in those foggy moments.
The article likened it somehow to our relationship with God—but I immediately applied it to my own situation.
Could I allow myself to have a good day today even though everything is screaming at me that I don’t deserve it?
Could I allow myself to ‘fly by the instruments’ that tell me that I’m an inherently worthwhile being simply by virtue of being human?
What we do DURING those moments of failure, confusion, and panic matters just as much as what we do after.
The two examples I just gave illustrate an important point—you can choose—against everything you see in front of you, all the evidence that you suck and your life sucks and nothing will ever get better—to tell yourself a different story right in that moment.
Because at least for me, it’s not even the failure itself that I fear—it’s how I feel toward myself during that failure.
None of us want to feel like we’re just trash and that our lives are hopeless—we don’t survive sustainably in that state for very long. That state is often meant to push us out of our situation—to give us that momentum to run as fast as we can away from that undesirable thing by making it appear disgusting.
But oftentimes, these spaces we find ourselves in don’t have a quick fix. Just like I couldn’t magically change my ex-husband’s mind to come home and talk things out with me, we often have to endure the after-effects for a bit.
But the worst part of being in that situation is feeling abandoned—by your own self—in those moments.
The more we choose to do what goes against our first instinct, and to stay loyal to ourselves even when we’ve messed up big-time, the more we learn to feel safe in our own bodies.
And we start feeling safer, then, to take more risks in life and to fail more. Because there’s no getting out of the fact that we will make more mistakes and we will feel uncomfortable again.
That is simply a fact of life, and the sooner we come to terms with it, the better.
Big success does NOT come without some risk
The fact is, you can’t find success, or even make change, without some kind of risk.
You may have to put something you really, deeply care about out there for people to potentially pick apart and tear to shreds. Do it anyway.
You may have to do something that makes your heart pound and stand there in front of a room of people feeling hyperaware of how your voice is shaking. Do it anyway.
You may have to face the bigger, deeper existential questions of life that you’ve been afraid to dig into. Do it anyway.
You may end up making poor choices and find yourself having to clean up the mess afterward.
But if this is something you truly want in your life—do it anyway.
Because you have already made it through some extremely tough situations if you’ve been alive on this planet for any significant length of time. And you didn’t melt like sugar—you’re still here. And if you’re reading this right now, you are still seeking to grow and get better.
And that is amazing.
So go out there and do yourself a favor—allow yourself to fail, big time. And you’ll see in the end just the type of badass you truly are.
