“I think I’m failing in love”
Let’s be silly here. It’s Friday after all. I’m about to tell you about something that happened to me this past week, that in the past, I’d have never ever dreamed of uttering out loud. I’d have buried this thing that happened so deep, and gone into a huge shame spiral, then pretended I wasn’t, and that all was cool.
So here we go. I made a huge gaffe on one of my social media posts this past week. A spectacular one! A huge, and very public fail! I’ve placed a photo here to show you how big this fail was! It’s a pic from a video I posted online. See if you spot my gaffe ………. yup, you got it, I failed big time! I’m not sure that spelling gaffes get any better than this. And I love it, and myself for it!!!
In the past, a gaffe like this would have left me completely mortified. I’d have gone into complete panic mode and it would feel like the blood was draining out of my body. My thoughts would be something like, “holy f*ck! How could I have screwed up like that? People will think I’m a complete dumbass. I’m a complete failure.” What I would then do, is hustle like f*ck to get that post deleted, fixed up and reposted. So I wouldn’t feel like a complete failure.
Fast forward, many years, and lots and lots and lots of personal work learning to bring more love and support to myself. OK, I will admit to this. I did have a brief moment of mild horror. Like, a mini horror moment, when I thought, “shit that doesn’t look good.” But then, I started to laugh, and what followed was a whole different set of responses to this failure.
What I want to spotlight here is this moment. This moment after, you feel like you f*cked it up. It is well worth studying THIS moment, cause the ability to navigate failure, is what success is built on. AND, because it’s this very moment that your pre-frontal cortex goes offline and you forget that anything exists other than shame and mortification. So let’s roll up our sleeves and become students at the school of failure.
The first thing is to bring enough support to yourself to ride out the feelings. Breathing, and observing feelings are always good choices. And time. No feeling lasts forever. And when the blood comes back to your body, and you no longer feel like you’re on the edge of a cliff you can make better choices.
That is the new sequence - pause, make better choices.
So, I can tell you the better choices that I made, to give you an idea of what I’m on about here:
laughter, at the gaffe and with myself,
thinking “How awesome I am to not let my frequent spelling gaffes and limited vocab stop me from being a writer.”
looking back at how far I’ve come, how much I’ve grown such that I CAN laugh at this
realizing failure is something to actually CELEBRATE, cause it means I took a risk and put myself out there
And perhaps the biggest, better choice is this - failing in love with myself. Whoops, I meant falling in love with myself! Or maybe I meant both. We are human. As such we fail at loving ourselves all the time. But we can also choose to love ourselves anyways. No matter how much we gaffe or f*ck it up - fall in love with yourself anyways.
CLICK HERE, if you’d like to see the full video of me failing in love. You will need to have an Instagram account to view.