Ah ne’er so dire a Thirst of Glory boast,
Nor in the Critick let the Man be lost!
Good-Nature and Good-Sense must ever join;
To err is [Human]; to Forgive, Divine.
- Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, Part II
I spoke today on a Neurodiversity Panel at the college at which I work. It went well, and while I was stressed the night of having been invited to join the panel a month ago, and while I was stressed this morning, I am happy I participated on the Panel as I did. I spoke of my lived experiences with Autism, I made suggestions and answered questions from Faculty and Staff, and I met new colleagues from other departments. All in all, a huge success.
A co-presenter of mine shared a story of their experiences with ADHD and being, in simpler terms of my choosing, a workaholic. They spent their collegiate years working and studying relentlessly before finally burning (and crashing) out. As they crashed and burned, they found themselves in dire circumstances with their academic institution—though to my understanding, they pulled through in the end, with help from said-institution. Their story struck me because it was so alien to me.
I spent my collegiate years (and my high school ones) largely coasting through life. I never studied, I never put any effort into anything. In high school my grades suffered from this lack of motivation, but though my behavior continued into college, my grades only improved. I never had to try, academically. This isn’t me bragging, however; when I say I’ve never had to study for something, that is no boast, but a lament—I do not know how to study for something. I take excellent notes, but I do not read them. Flash cards and the pouring over of textbooks have no effect on me. Either I had internalized information immediately upon having been taught it, or I found myself in a position in which I could not self-actuate and reinforce my learning. If the grades were anything to go by, this was “good enough” in college, but post-grad, and in my maturation, it is something that has haunted me in the back of my mind for many years. One can look to my years-long struggles with finding a stable job as an example of how this behavioral ‘coasting’ came back to bite me.
As I sat on the panel reflecting on this in light of my colleague’s story, I was reminded of another experience I witnessed in high school—I say witness, as it was not my experience at all, but one that unfolded before me.
I went to Bancroft School in Worcester, Massachusetts for my high school education. Bancroft is, first and foremost, expensive. But with that price tag there is also a degree of…“eliteness.” Of privilege. Of an isolated, sheltered world. Its students came from families that were, at the time, upper-middle-class, if not higher up the pecking order still. For these students, the thought of attending a prestigious college—or any college, for that matter—was not a possibility, but an inevitability. Success, then, was a foregone conclusion—an assumption.
Not so for me.
I struggled greatly with the Latin classes I was taking. On occasion, to this day, I’ll still have the occasional nightmare about Latin’s tests. But the memory that sticks with me most concerns another student who for the sake of anonymity we will call ‘Jane’. While I took Latin, Jane took French across the hall. And to my understanding, Jane was very competent with learning French. Yet as I exited my Latin class one day, I found Jane had joined me in my struggles with foreign language; Jane was in tears, pleading with her teacher about the possibility of retaking a failed test.
And that’s it. That’s the story. Those two-to-three seconds of which I witnessed Jane’s plight have stuck with me for years on end. I do not know if her pleas were answered. But what struck me, then, and what I am reminded of now, is that Jane did not know how to fail. Something I, in my lackadaisical coasting, had all but perfected, and thought little of. Yet what I perceived to be a minor happenstance of life had shattered Jane’s day and brought her to tears; what was for me so regular was for her, in those moments, a life-ruining cataclysm.
Jane is hardly alone in this. Whether their reckoning came in high school, or in college, or as a post-grad, I have witnessed many of my high school classmates suffer dearly from a failure here or there. But as Pope says, To err is Human. It is as inevitable as the assumed-collegiate fate that my classmates idealized for themselves. Best to prepare for failure, but never to be afraid of its possibility. To succeed in all things is not necessary, nor likely. But our prime capacity for growth comes from moments of failure, in spite of the challenges that seem to keep us down. When I started my job at my current employer, I made a handful of mistakes right off the bat. Were they worrying? Sure. What if I was let go? What if I couldn’t fix what I had done? I could have lost myself in those anxieties, and if I had, they may have been realized. But a life spent failing had readied me to accept and own up to my mistakes. I was not let go of my job, and I did fix and address whatever errors I had committed.
Failure is only so if we choose to remain in its shadow.
Crown of Thorns, and its sequel, Throne of Souls, are no longer for sale. I took them down willingly some time ago. The short reason is because I was dissatisfied with their contents. The longer reason is because they were written in a time of my personal failing, and as authors (and all artists, really) insert a piece of themselves into their work, I was not happy with the piece of myself I had placed in my books. I intend to rewrite them, both of them, from scratch, in full. As above, I only see this as a failure if I never bring myself to overcome it.
In recent times, I have been continuing to write the fanfiction I hinted at in my (long-ago) prior blogpost. That story has surpassed 375,000 words in length, and has many more still to go. I am using it to improve my writing—something that I have quantifiably observed as occurring—and to experiment with different writing styles. I do not see the fact that I cannot publish or make money from this investment of my time as a ‘waste’ or a ‘failure’—instead, I see it as an investment in myself, and it seems to be paying off so far.
I am approaching 30 years of age. For 29 years, I have lived with my parents. Depending on where you are when you read this, that may seem like a sociological ‘failure’ unto itself; that is as it reads here in the U.S., anyways. Yet by this time next month, that, too, shall change, and that ‘failure,’ if it is one, shall be grown out from. Soon I’ll be in an apartment I could call my own, fending for myself in this wide and wacky world of ours. It’s no grand success story, but it is nonetheless a story of my success. But just as shadows cannot exist without a light to cast them, success holds little value without the opportunity, nay, the privilege to fail.