New Beginnings: Failure Does Not Exist

If we take a closer look at failure, we will see that failure is an illusion, that we are eternal beings created from love and for love, and that love heals all

“Title Relief Plaque Depicting the God Horus as a Falcon Place Egypt (Object made in) Date 664 BCE–30 BCE Medium Limestone.” Photo and caption by Art Institute of Chicago on Unsplash (Please go easy, this is a beautiful image, I refuse to be one of those people who look for negative symbolism in everything outside their familiar echo chamber, I am who I am, and I am DEFINITELY not afraid of art :)

This story is light and heavy, heavy and light. It is about how this year, I seemingly failed at about everything, and in the process learned that failure doesn’t exist.

I am sharing it with you because when experiences like that are shared with love, one person’s experiences may become medicine for other people, and I think that understanding that we need not fear “failure” could untie a lot of suffering hands and bring new joy. That is my hope. My hope is more, more, more joy.

Value of mistakes

Does the child walk perfectly on the very first try? Maybe sometimes—but if not, the child falls, gets up, tries to walk again, and then—mysteriously, somehow—walks.

Life is not a mechanical clock. It’s a process. Any skill requires a process, and that process may include falling, failing, making mistakes, and transforming them into experiences.

We are energy. Being energy is our true nature. And so, when we try things imperfectly, it may look like a failure on the surface—but we are still adding our energy to perfection, and we are getting closer to doing it “right”—assuming we don’t drown in self-doubt or other people’s opinions, and don’t give up.

Failure is not failure. It’s a step in the process that teaches us about what’s not working. And, because we are eternal, I think that even “failed” lives are not failed at all. It’s impossible to know God but I think that, when our lives are viewed through God’s eyes, there is no such thing as failure, just souls learning new ways to walk.

Me, raw

So.

Me.

This past year was the year when I thought I was doing well despite all the very real difficulties I was dealing with—and then it fell apart to pieces, and I found myself in a place of total sadness, total dark.

I experienced what felt like total betrayal of the impossible kind.

One of the most important relationships in my life, a relationship of total trust and openness of many years disappeared—without a warming, without an explanation, without anything that foretold the possibility of it just disappearing.

I had considered it indestructible, impossible to break, the kind of a human relationship that is completely pure, all light. Something that happens once in a million years, total purity. Total real beauty. On my part, and maybe not just on my part, it was pure love, the kind that exists in children’s tales, total purity, total trust of the sweetest kind. There were many years of friendship that had carried me through great pain and tough challenges, there were many years of loving support, many years of dependency perhaps but still, completely sacred, light-driven, and pure.

And then it disappeared overnight. No explanation, nothing. There was pure love, and then there was silence. Just silence. Just silence. Silence that was cutting my being into a million helpless pieces, silence that was more deafening than a million nuclear bombs, silence that was irrational, illogical, unexplainable, impossible, really impossible, this relationship had been at the foundation of my being, it felt, and then it was gone.

I felt like a widow of war. I felt nothing but grief. I prayed, and my voice was breaking, I was trying to find some ground to stand on but all I could do was scream my pain out. I appealed to any loving force in the invisible world who could possibly bring any clarity, any explanation, any resolution, any soothing of pain.

I felt like my meaning was no more, my structure was no more, my foundation that I had been putting together for so many years was no more.

I just cried. And I chocked on mourning, I was barely able to pretend to care, I couldn’t and didn’t want to talk to anyone about it, I just cried.

And as I was doing it,, I was still taking care of what I need to care of.

I was still writing whenever useful words came to me, hoping that my words would help another soul. But as soon as I poured out the words that felt useful in the moment of writing, I was back to the world where I was my pain, where on the inside, there was just pure grief, pure feeling of being abandoned, ringing nuclear emptiness, total despair.

It felt dark. I saw energies that I didn’t want to see. And I was alone.

At one point, I saw my reflection and realized that I better start eating, so I started forcing some kind of pasta down my digestive tract because my clothes had started falling off me, and there was seemingly no ending to it outside of me deciding to find myself in all this, somehow.

And I prayed. And I looked for answers, please, something to reduce the pain, please.

All my life, it so happened that my important role models were male. I craved wise women, and a few years prior, I had found Sobonfu Some, a traditional African elder, and adopted her as a female role model for myself. She had already passed away by the time I discovered her work but I was leaning about the female perspective on the world from her books and talks. She had written and spoken about intimacy in human relationships, the energy she brought forth spoke to me sweetly, and—with gratitude—I was learning a lot from her.

So, when all that happened, I fell on her words—and discovered suddenly that she, too, had at one point failed and gone through a great shock. I was of course hoping that her specific experience did not apply to me because it was too impossible to bear! As I listened to her, I prayed and forbade myself from thinking that her story could possibly apply to me.

Sobonfu was a beloved traditional Dagara elder. In her culture, to the best of my understanding, divorces aren’t expected to happen, they aren’t a thing. The entire village is responsible for helping families live and grow harmoniously and resolve conflicts in a spiritually appropriate way.

Sofonfu got married to another beloved Dagara elder, whose books I had also learned from, and came to America to live with her husband here. Then at some point, according to how I understand the story she told, her husband decided to leave her for another woman, and she experienced a steep fall from grace where she suddenly felt betrayed in a shocking way, and the people who had previously treated her with respect started treating her like she was nothing, her being a stranger in a foreign country, away from her mother and her elders, feeling pain.

If I heard her story correctly, she found herself in a place where she was experiencing betrayal for the first time in her life, was in tremendous pain, and even had panic attacks—all while being a fiercely free and spiritually powerful human being whose traditional knowledge and wisdom were beautiful, real, and deep. Even so, facing modern challenges was hard to bear for her when it happened, and she was In great pain.

As I listened to her speak about that time in her life, my heart tried to stay afloat. I was praying that, no, this kind of betrayal cannot happen to me. I was shocked that it had happened to her, and I prayed that it didn’t apply to me.

And I waited for answers, but the answers weren’t coming the way I had hoped. And I prayed and cried, cried and prayed, and my prayers brought me more understanding of myself but no functional understanding of what was going on.

I continued living in what felt like total darkness for several months. And because it didn’t look like anyone was coming to save me, I had to find me.

There was just me. And so I started pedaling harder in the direction of finding out who am I in the world, and why I am here.

Looking back, I really like what I found.

If I could push a button right now and go back to the old dream, I would probably choose to not push it. I like myself quite a bit.

Do I miss the purity that I used to have a year ago? Sure I do. I would be a terrible liar if I said that the pain is all gone.

But the joy of me is bigger now that the pain of a fantasy crushed.

And I do believe that pure things don’t die. I believe that answers come in due time (maybe not in this lifetime but, being eternal, I am still looking forward to healing, healing is better than pain). I feel gratitude for all the good and beautiful things that came to my life from that human being, and I feel pure love. There is nothing in this world but love.

I don’t know what happened. I may never know what happened in this lifetime.

But I am excited to have learned to love myself no matter what. And I am not lying when I say that I am excited and happy. I am excited and happy to love me, to be who I am, to have meaning in life. I am grateful to the Creator for the fact that I exist as me, all is light.

Life is learning.

Life is love.

We don’t die.

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