Well that was a miserable failure

I tried to be creative.

I tried making a spiderweb style thing. No go

I tried making a dream catcher. Nope.

I even tried making a piece of modern art with the circles hanging horizontally, like a strange chandelier. Not happening.

I had a lot of wire so I twisted it and pulled it and bent it and curled it. Nothing worked.

It looked like en elementary school art project…and not a good one lol

Have you ever had something you feel like you should be able to do just collapse into an abysmal failure? I have. Well, clearly I have, I write about them, this time included. This time it literally collapsed, though. I was trying to hold the circles while I was wrapping the wire and no matter how I propped them up; they fell apart. Again, and again, and again. Frankly, the fact that I didn’t hurl the whole thing out a window has me pretty impressed with myself.

What is it that makes me believe I can create things that are graceful and beautiful? Well, I have a degree in Fine Arts so there’s that. But I have also spent my life creating things that, in my opinion at least, are esthetically pleasing. I’ve also sold my art and designs for years, so I don’t think I’m off base on that assumption either.

So why does it bother me so much that there is one thing I can’t do well, or at least passably well? What is it that makes it hard for anyone to accept we have failed? Human nature? Survival instincts? Shame? I mean, nobody wants to be a failure, but why does it stick in our throats to have to admit we can’t do something?

For me, I believe it is a reaction to trying so hard to be perfect all the time. Which is what led me to burn the candle at both ends to try to keep up with my expectations of myself and eventually come to the point where, sticking with the same metaphor, I burned out. I have spent years recovering after I drained my reserves dry or every ounce of strength and resiliency I had. When I found myself at zero, I had to learn to fill myself up again without knowing what that even meant to me. I had spent so long shuffling fuel from one place to another I had never realized I had a finite amount because I never refueled, I just took from one place to fill another. When I finally emptied the tank, I literally had no idea what had happened. On that day, I found myself in a very unpleasant and uncomfortable position. I had to ask for help and I had to ask for support and I had to learn how to do things and not redo them to try to make them perfect all the time. I had to learn how to rely on other people to give me guidance about what was enough and what was too much to try to do. I had to learn to shorten my to do lists, so they were manageable. I had to learn to be a whole new person.

So what does that have to do with this project being a miserable failure? It reminded me of a time when I would have been upset not to make it ‘come out right’ and there was a time when not following the directions would not have occurred to me. Failing at it this month meant that I had a lesson to learn, not an actual failure to be ashamed of. And that’s a pretty big step.

If I go back and read my older posts, especially some of the original ones, I feel like it’s obvious how much I’ve changed, but I also know what the inside of my head was like back then so maybe it’s not as obvious as it feels to me. But take my word for it, inside I was beating myself up for not being perfect all the time in everything I did.

Why bring it up? Mostly because I wrote my arts and crafts project was a miserable failure and then stopped and thought about it. Those words held no power to embarrass me. It was a simple statement of fact, not a judgement about my worth or my ability to be a good human, and I wanted to mark the recognition I had that failing at something, doesn’t make you a failure.