Fear & Failure In Life, Art, and Business
What I know: I’m majorly struggling with the fear of failure.
What I don’t know: really, anything beyond that.
It’s the failures of the past and the uncertainties of the future that cause the fear of failure to loom over me. It’s the overwhelm of all the things there are to do and all the things I will necessarily leave undone. It’s the possibility of human eyes on my work and my words, that inspire fear in me.
I badly want freedom from this, but I realize that this is maybe a lifelong struggle of mine, and I can’t expect to really work it out in one essay. I’m still going to try because I don’t know what to do. I’m so sick of feeling paralyzed. I’m tired of the false starts and I’m honestly tired of playing it safe. I’m also tired of caring about all of the people’s opinions. I can’t please everybody and I’m not going to be for everybody. I will attract and I will repel.
In 2019 I experienced a double-whammy professional and personal failure that really left a mark on me. I started a family photography business at the beginning of 2018, made some poor decisions with it and then abandoned it when I started raising my step-kids full time in 2019. I also, very naively, decided to homeschool them right after moving in with them. We sent them back to public school in January of 2020, and the pandemic hit two months later. Then I really crumbled.
In the middle of the pandemic, I really wasn’t sure if my newly-blended family would make it through. We were struggling so much and I simply didn’t have the capacity to process the failures I experienced. I continued to experience small failures every single day as I navigated learning to parent two new-to-me kids and a global pandemic simultaneously. The weight of this season nearly crushed me.
It was right in the middle of that season though, that I started spending more time on art than I had in the past. I had graduated with a BFA in photography in 2014, and had considered myself an artist for a long time - I had always dabbled in different things. But I hadn’t quite given traditional mediums like watercolors, pencil, and pen the time or attention it needed. So, having nowhere else to go, I started. Eventually, in late 2021 and early 2022, when the kids went back to school and I had a quiet house, I made some art that I actually liked.
With time, I’ve been able to see the purpose in my failures. The benefits of trying and failing at homeschool and a business are not at all lost on me. I’m able to look back on myself during the pandemic with so much more compassion that I was able to have for myself in the moment. I learned valuable things about myself in those experiences, but most of all, I was humbled. I learned that I’m fallible but that things can still work out despite my many failures.
And that’s the good news - things did work out! My family is still a family and we’re so much happier now. And this year, I’ve gotten back into business, taking the art that I started making in 2022, making more of it, and trying to get it into the world. I’ve already seen some small successes with it, and received so much incredible encouragement. But still, the fear of failing has followed me and quite honestly tortured me for much of this year.
So, here we are. It’s clear to me, and we all know, that failure is inevitable. I know that I am fallible. I know that with time, these big and small failures are actually turned into lessons learned. Or at least, they have the opportunity to be transformed into something meaningful. I’m realizing more than ever that I have to trust God with that transformation process. Because even still, seeing firsthand how He has worked things out in my life, I will take my inevitable, necessary-for-learning failures, and turn them into my identity. “I am a failure.” I’ve thought those words often. But I believe we’re created intentionally and with purpose, and to regard myself as a failure on the level of my identity goes against everything that I believe.
I’m grappling with these irrational fears and feelings in real time, by writing out my story and trying to see the bigger picture. That piece is really important - being able to take a step back. When I look back on some of the content I made for my family photography business years ago, I can see the potential in it. I can see that it was actually a pretty good beginning. At the time, though, I felt similarly as I do now: anxious, scared, and expecting the worst. So, I’m trying to look at what I’m doing now and simply see the potential in it. I can pretend I’m five years in the future, seeing the beginning for what it is - a beginning, the sprouting of a seed - and love myself as I walk through it, make many mistakes, and do my best in it.
The beginning is hard because I’m making something out of nothing. I don’t have a following or any of these worldly metrics to validate myself or my ideas - it’s just me, being vulnerable and hoping everyone gets it. And sometimes they won’t. But no one looks at the bud of a flower and yells at it because it’s not fully in bloom. So why would I do that to myself? Why do we do this to ourselves?
What I’m really seeking and fighting for is contentment in this stage of my life and my business and my art. The name of the the three piece body of work that I’m currently making is “Take it All In” and it’s about finding contentment with both the fleeting, beautiful moments, and the painful moments of waiting, all while trusting that better things are to come. I’m learning to do my work to the best of my ability, put it out there, and let the rest go. I’m learning to trust God, and probably myself too.