The silence on this blog is glaring. Crafting yet another introduction to yet another apology for silence fills me with a familiar feeling of fraudulence, a nagging insecurity about my repeated inability to embrace the constant grind that being a writer requires.
Yet I can embrace one thing: the knowledge that the root of all of this silence comes from my persistent willingness to value success over failure. That is, my silence roots not from an inability to speak, but an inability to accept the failure that inevitably comes from each and every attempt I will ever make to express myself wholly. Good ideas do not emerge intrinsically; they emerge from iterations and iterations of an idea, and it takes a lot of failure to get to a successful idea worth sharing. And while I could have been iterating on failures, I was instead, finding short-term successes in my career. Much of my daily job requires producing successes, which means that much of my work happens in the form of ephemeral face-to-face interactions or in short, satisfying e-mails. I am not shaming myself for engrossing fully in this work (it has been the right thing to do at this point in my life), but I also want to work on embracing more fully the work required to write.
That is, today, I want to embrace the work of failure. I’m starting this by writing what’s going to be something of a failure at a blog post.
Why am I already saying that this blog post is a failure? I’m saying it’s a failure because it does not adhere to any of the conventions of a blog post. Its title is not that catchy; it won’t get caught on any search engine optimization filters. The only way anyone will ever read or find this is if I share it through social media. Otherwise, it’ll just be a part of the block of Internet content noise. Fine. So be it. I’m embracing it.
It’s also a failure because it’s not going to compel you to do anything. It won’t offer you an action item; it’ll simply offer you with some understanding of how I’m feeling about my writing now and my identity as a “writer.” Maybe that’ll be worthwhile to you. But this post is still something of a blogging failure precisely because it doesn’t explicitly offer you much of anything. I’m aware of your needs as an audience, but I’m not really addressing them right now. I’m going to apologize – yes, sorry – but I know that apology probably seems a little insincere because I’m not really going to do anything to remedy this failure of a blog post. It’s going to live as a little failure.
I’m deliberately making failure to help myself embrace it. What I’ve learned from my various identity pivots over the years – thinking of myself as a creative writer to a journalist to a burgeoning professor to a “higher education professional” – is that boxing myself into successes and expecting myself to produce my best work possible at all times is not possible. My pivots have been possible because I’ve been willing to “fail” and, have, instead, turned my failures or falterings into futures. I’ve never always been entirely comfortable with that, but remaining flexible, trying new things, and discovering new strengths has, much to my surprise, made me pretty happy.
I’m going to fail a little more on this blog soon and make this my space to keep experimenting with ideas and allowing this to be the space where I see things that are working and not working. This will be the only one I’ll continue to learn and grow.