Tag: wisdom
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Daring to Fail: Uncovering the Hidden Strengths in Our Struggles
“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” ~Robert F. Kennedy
How do you define failure?
When something doesn’t go as planned?
When someone tells you they don’t like what you’ve made?
When an outcome doesn’t match your expectations?
I find it increasingly important to define failure. Which seems like a weird thing to do because we’re all trying to avoid it. Even talking about failure feels like it has the power to bring about failure.
No one wants to be labelled a failure. And it’s because of that underlying fear that we end up stuck, miserable, and afraid of the very actions that will release us from that doubt.
Here’s a glimpse into a story I often find myself repeating. I come up with an idea, I get feedback, and I start building. I’m acting from a place of creative excitement where my juices are flowing. I’m swept away by the belief that this idea could change the trajectory of my life.
And then… the outcome doesn’t match my expectations. It doesn’t reach as many people as I thought it would. Or it isn’t as profitable as I thought it might be.
It bloody guts me.
I grasp what I think is the issue. I ruminate on what should have been. I get pissed off because it feels like I’m back at ground zero.
Am I doomed for failure?
That depends on the choice I make next.
Do I give up?
Then you best believe I’m a failure.
Because the life we want reveals itself by taking another step forward.
As Winston Churchill said, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
You’ve heard of the Fortune 500, right? It’s a term that gets thrown around a lot, especially in business circles.
The Fortune 500, an annual leaderboard published by Fortune magazine, ranks the 500 most revenue-generating companies in the United States. It’s a snapshot of business success. Yet, a glance from 1955 to 2019 reveals only 10.4% of companies remained on the list.
This stark turnover underscores a crucial lesson: Success is fleeting without continual adaptation.
And therein lies peace of mind.
The point isn’t to climb the peak and stay there. These places that feel like destinations are nothing more than sandcastles, eventually washing away with the tide.
The point is to use what you’ve learned and apply it to your next adventure.
So how do we decide which direction to take after a “failure”?
How can we know which choice will lead us to the best possible version of our lives?
Failure = feedback.
We can only tell where something is in relation to something else.
Putting in the effort means we have something to compare and contrast it to.
There’s a tendency to focus on what the tiny sliver of companies did to succeed, but far more can be gleaned from what the majority didn’t do and why they disappeared.
What did they stop doing?
What did they foolishly ignore because they wanted to be right?
Why did they stop asking questions?
Why couldn’t they see their blind spots?
Whether it’s a failing business, someone who has plateaued with their health goals, or a parent who can’t connect with their teenager, they all share one commonality that led to their failure: They stopped seeking feedback.
Meaning they no longer put in effort. The one and only action that gives us clarity.
I remind myself of this when I’m hyper-focused on the outcome. I feel like a helpless failure because I’m ignoring the actions that will change the outcome: the inputs.
Thomas J. Watson, a former chairman and CEO of IBM, identified fear of failure as the reason we don’t experience momentum in our lives: “Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure, or you can learn from it, so go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that’s where you will find success.”
Don’t like the taste of your spaghetti bolognese sauce (the outcome)? Change the ingredients (the inputs).
Here’s the lesson I’m still learning: This takes time. The most effective way to change the outcome is by changing one input at a time. If I switch out all the ingredients at once, I’m back to playing a guessing game.
But if I try San Marzano tomatoes instead of diced tomatoes? Oh, hot damn. We’re cooking up something delicious, and now I understand what brings me one step closer to the outcome I want.
In the context of my creative pursuits, instead of discarding a project, I engage in more discussions to understand what isn’t working. I ask: Have I offered a valuable solution to a widespread problem? Have I demonstrated how my solution works? Then, did I adjust the project and clearly convey the changes to those who provided feedback? This keeps me on track without guesswork, acknowledging that the first iteration, untested, often fails.
It feels a hell of a lot less daunting to approach failure like an experiment.
Transform failure into a laboratory. Each misstep is an experiment, a finding. Adjust one input at a time, observe the change, and inch closer to your desired outcome. This week, change one ingredient in your strategy, whether at work, in relationships, or in personal goals. Observe, learn, iterate.
Life is a constant iteration, a series of experiments where failure morphs into feedback, driving us closer to the life we envision. Remember that every step forward, no matter how small, is a step boldly taken toward your dreams.
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Finding Home: The Magic of Feeling Seen and Heard
“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place to go where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” ~Maya Angelou
In 2019, I found myself in a psychiatric institution sitting across from a psychologist who was grilling me about why I was there. She seemed angry.
I told her how heartbroken I was that no one “believed” the physical symptoms I was dealing with, caused by chronic illness and benzodiazepine withdrawal. I told her how my nervous system had been hijacked, and I could not control the terror I felt daily. I told her how everyone just assumed I was crazy and making it all up, and that even with a doctor’s diagnosis, I found myself in this terror alone each day.
She wore glasses and a blue suit, and I rambled, overexplaining to her the debilitating effects of withdrawal, derealization, extreme sensitivities, and depersonalization.
I talked about the emotional issues I had from trauma, and how I knew that what had occurred in the last ten years was more than that. I was getting sicker and sicker, and doctors could not explain it until very recently when they found that I had chronic inflammatory reactions from an overreactive immune system and was also in withdrawal from benzodiazepines.
I only took one pill a day and began having symptoms each day at around the same time. I told her how completely invalidated I felt and alone in my search for what was hurting my brain and body. She looked down and said, “That is really hard to believe.”
Clearly, the “danger” that brought me there did not cease while sitting across from her; it intensified. I knew gaslighting well, and the shame that went with it.
“I want to call my doctor, and I want you to speak with him,” I said, and then decided to stop talking. It became clear that this was not a place to be helped or heard, just a place to try to tolerate for a bit.
That night I lay in my bed, envisioning somewhere warm, where people sat by the beach strumming guitars, drinking fruit juices, talking, listening, and connecting with each other. The sun shone, the blue ocean waves crashed on the shore, and the birds sang. I wore a beach dress and flowers in my hair, and everyone around me in this community loved me.
The emotions I felt with this visualization were love, joy, and a feeling of being home with people who acknowledged me, wanted me around, and believed me. It helped to calm my highly activated body. The home found in these visuals was what I sobbed for each day and used to soothe my nervous system.
I remember sobbing on my mother’s floor, begging her to take me “to the beach” when in a wave of withdrawal. Helpless, she grabbed me, helping me up, and said she didn’t understand nor know how to help.
It was true that I was already dysregulated before withdrawal. Disconnected since childhood from a stable home inside, I searched on the outside for this anchor. I suffered anxiety and bouts of depression along with other trauma-related dysregulation.
The ache for home began long before taking my first benzodiazepine, and safety was a feeling I could not always access alone.
It is also true that benzodiazepines exacerbated this tenfold and, together with the dysregulation, caused a whole host of chronic issues as well as perpetuated them. Unfortunately, my new doctor wearing blue did not believe me, nor did she believe the doctor I was working with on the outside who had called her.
The next morning in my cold, sterile, blue and white room, I woke up to find a girl sleeping in the bed next to me. There was a guard sitting in our room. I showered and went to breakfast.
There was a table of “regulars” who had been there for some time. They joked and talked loudly. I knew I was not welcome at this table. So I found a spot at a table where heads were down, and the energy was of middle schoolers on their first day of class, thinking of the right words to say, and the right “kids” to say it to.
I turned to a girl next to me and introduced myself. She was short and thin with delicate features and black tight curls. Just like that, her story came gushing out. She didn’t feel heard by her ultra-religious parents as they got ready to move to a town she didn’t want to go, sending her to a school she didn’t want to attend.
She sat next to another young woman, who often got up and danced around the room, fluttering about and sharing memories and a picture of her beautiful mother, who had passed when she was young. She was highly successful working in tech. She told me how much she “liked me already” and that when we got out, we should go dancing together.
Across from me was a social worker, mid-thirties, who laughed about the irony of his job. He said he “freaked out” after being robbed during a one-night stand and was taken in. And he worried about his employer finding out.
Another older man told us about how he was in and out of these hospitals intentionally. He came from a wealthy family and was not in contact with them any longer, and it was here that he felt safe. He didn’t know how to function on the outside, and each time he was released he found a way to return. He told us which hospitals had the best food, and which were the kindest.
After some time, my roommate showed up. Her guard sat her at a desk alone and hovered over her.
At my table, we talked, laughed, shared extra juices, and rested in the knowledge that we all understood each other—immediately. In my hospital gown, I felt the warmth of the sun, heard the ocean waves crash, and sipped my fruit juice as we shared stories, talking, listening, and connecting.
For the first time in a very long time, I felt connected and acknowledged.
In the next couple of days, we consulted with each other before signing up for groups to be together, ate each meal at the same table, graduated to being able to wear tights under our gowns, shared socks, had an “intervention” for our older friend who couldn’t stay on the outside more than a few weeks, finally got to talk to my roommate who told us the reason she was monitored, and watched her expression evolve from pain and anger to peace and lightness.
After dinner, there was free time. We spent it all together in the lounge, and an older woman talked of the days when she danced salsa and showed us some steps. We took turns making phone calls and seeing our doctors. We all had negative feelings toward the therapist in blue (as well as much of the staff, who were unnecessarily harsh), and I requested someone else. It was denied.
We learned how to act in front of the nurses, who were all too happy to write down anything they perceived as “problem behavior” and held these “behaviors” as reason to keep us longer. At night, Katie (my roommate) and I whispered about how we expected a much gentler place, and how fortunate we were to have each other to go through our time here.
Each day we spent our free time together, acted on our best behavior in groups so that we would all get out, and planned a reunion. We laughed and relished in how quickly we had bonded, how much we had in common and to share with each other, and how this could not be a coincidence.
We all agreed that, somehow, we were placed here together for a reason, as it was exactly what each one of us needed—to be heard and to be seen.
One by one, we were released, exchanged numbers, and promised to reunite. Of course I looked forward to going home, but I knew that I had spent the last week with the home I had been searching for, one of unconditional acceptance.
I left resting in the knowledge that a group of people had acknowledged me, accepted me, and believed me.
This was the beginning of my healing. It was in these moments that my body and brain could rest, and clarity began.
I found in this unlikely place the home I had been searching for, amongst strangers who quickly became family. I also found a feeling of safety I could not find within myself, and soon after it began to grow inside of me.
I think that’s the goal for all of us. Sometimes it just takes a while to find people who will see, hear, and accept us, but they’re out there. And they’re probably waiting to feel seen and heard too—by people just like us.
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The Closure in Accepting That They May Never Change
“One of the hardest things I’ve had to understand is that closure comes from within. Especially difficult if you’ve been betrayed by someone you love because you feel like you gotta let them know the pain they caused, but the peace you seek can only be given to you by you.” ~Bruna Nessif
Many years ago, I wrote a very personal post for Tiny Buddha titled Get Past It Instead of Getting Even: Revenge Isn’t Winning.
The post described the challenges I experienced with my parents as an adult and, ultimately, my decision to cease all relations with them.
Such a decision was by no means easy or hastily made.
It required many years of guidance and counseling to accept that sometimes such a drastic decision is necessary for maintaining one’s mental health and the health of other meaningful relationships.
Over the years, I have experienced sharp criticism for that decision to dissociate from my parents. I’ve been branded an awful son, self-centered, and even a hypocrite based on my writings when compared to the reality of my familial relationship.
I understand the criticisms because I once was on the opposite side of where I am now, with a seemingly perfect family relationship that others envied.
I was quick to judge those estranged from their families with some of the same criticisms now cast at me.
I was simply unable to fully grasp how it was possible that a bloodline connection could ever be severed, and how life could go on without their presence.
But what we see often differs from reality, and perfection is unsustainable and unattainable when it comes to family relations.
Before you know it, you have transformed from the harshest critic to the pitiable object, constantly wondering how lifelong relationships could quickly deteriorate with such hatred and anger.
But the passage of time, combined with age and life’s unending volatilities, alters one’s perception and relaxes the emotions we once believed would extinguish our joy, sanity, and quality of life.
This new perspective is an unanticipated sensation after such a tumultuous experience, and suddenly, the word “closure” is no longer foreign to one’s vocabulary.
An Attempt at Reconciliation
It was early December, and homeownership again handed me an unexpected repair project in my kitchen. It appeared easy enough at first but became much more complicated once I understood the problem.
Pausing momentarily to decide how best to proceed, given that a clever solution was necessary if I did not want to incur a hefty repair cost, I immediately began thinking about my father.
Growing up, my father and I were incredibly close.
We spent a great deal of time in each other’s company, sharing long conversations with him mentoring me on the mechanical skills he was so adept with.
Sitting on my kitchen floor, lost in a sea of nostalgia, I realized how invaluable those conversations and his mentoring were. How other invaluable life lessons often sprouted from those conversations. And how, regardless of all that had occurred, I considered myself grateful that he was my father.
As tears began pooling in my eyes, I decided I had to reach out to him at that moment, sharing my nostalgia and gratitude while naively hoping this might be the impetus we needed to reconnect.
Fearing my mother would intercept any hard-copy communication, I turned to social media and sent him a private message through his Facebook page.
My message to my father was 436 words long.
At the start, I acknowledged how the passage of time and age softens our perspectives, lessens the bitterness, and enables us to see and appreciate things we took for granted in the past.
I acknowledged how we all played a role in our eventual separation, how conversations could have been handled differently and more beneficially, and how blame at this point was futile.
I reminisced about our relationship, his teachings, our obsession with car care, and how, regardless of our separation, the memories we shared would live in my heart and mind forever.
It was sincere and sentimental, filled with a hopeful optimism about reconnecting with a person I have missed greatly over the years.
I am unashamed to admit that after writing those 436 words and reviewing them several times afterward, I cried, not necessarily for the loss that I still bore, but over my capacity to look beyond this unhappy part of my past and attempt to reconcile it.
Closure Comes from Within
For two weeks, I checked my Facebook account constantly, excited over the prospect of renewing our relationship.
I understood that even if things did not turn out as I hoped, I was glad he knew how I was feeling and what I was thinking.
Then, after two weeks and one day, on a sunny, fifty-degree afternoon in early December, my inbox alerted me that I had a response to my private Facebook message.
I probably waited ten minutes before finally opening the message, hopeful that the passage of time, combined with age and life’s unending volatilities, had altered his perception and relaxed his emotions.
Sadly, it had not.
My father’s response was thirty-seven words long and void of all sentimentality.
Narcissistic tendencies, the catalyst for our eventual separation, were still painfully evident in his opening sentence: “You have no idea what has happened to us, and I am not going to tell you.”
His overall indifference toward the content of my message was obvious when he said, “Don’t play up to me,” which revealed his doubtfulness over my sincerity.
Though short, his words were incredibly telling, confirming what I had feared and why I was so skeptical about reaching out to my parents earlier.
Author Mandy Hale says it best: “To get over the past, you first have to accept that the past is over. No matter how many times you revisit it, analyze it, regret it or sweat it… it’s over. It can hurt you no more.”
Though a decade and a half has passed, the past is very much a part of my parents’ present.
Unexpected misfortunes like my father referenced often have a redemptive effect on an individual’s long-standing resentments, but they appear to have only intensified theirs.
There has been no personal growth, no self-admissions, and no remorse of any kind. Honestly, I am astonished by their incapability.
While I know many hurtful exchanges transpired between my parents and me, I have not allowed them to define my past or clutter my present. I do not want to be a victim but rather a witness to a mishandled situation that belongs in the past.
My parents, on the other hand, have branded themselves “the victims” for so long while manipulating the narrative to suit that claim that I am not even sure they know what the truth is any longer, and that is a very sad place to find oneself.
Several days after receiving my father’s short response, I thought I would be overcome with sadness and grief, immobilized by the realization that my family would never be whole again.
But something unexpected occurred instead.
I began to feel at peace.
While not the ideal conclusion, the situation has now been resolved.
I will no longer feel guilty about not trying to reconcile, no longer question if my father is missing our relationship or not, and no longer crave an outcome that I now understand is impossible.
And so, I can finally and definitively assign closure to the unfortunate end of my familial relationship.
Did I want my situation to turn out differently? Of course.
But meaningful relationships cannot be sustained by living in a questionable past while refusing to acknowledge any failings that need to be remedied.
Regardless of who is at fault, I encourage anyone in similar circumstances to reach out to those whose presence still lingers in their heart and minds.
I do not encourage this solely as a possibility for reconciliation, but rather for the ability to find peace in the truth, whether good, bad, or indifferent.
Closure often springs from the acceptance of that truth and the understanding that healing can still occur even if our efforts are not reciprocated.
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3 Popular Myths Around Having and Healing Anxiety
“Never fear shadows. They simply mean there’s a light shining somewhere nearby.” ~Ruth E. Renkel
Before I started healing my anxiety, I thought there was something seriously wrong with me. Every panic attack, every morning filled with dread, every social event that I would mentally prepare myself for made me feel like I had some inner deficiency that no one else had.
I used to work as a cashier at a grocery store and would avoid hanging out with people twenty-four hours before my shift. Yep. That means if I worked on Saturday morning, I wouldn’t hang out with anyone from Friday afternoon to the evening.
Why? Because I had to “prepare” myself for my entry-level position at the grocery store. I had to “make sure I felt okay,” as if the whole world was watching to see if I didn’t smile for an hour.
I was extremely critical of myself and felt that if I wasn’t drenched in positivity, I was useless to the world. And that if I wasn’t exuding confidence every moment of my life, people would think I wasn’t good enough.
When I started on my journey to healing my anxiety, I uncovered a few life events that had had a major effect on my inner world. One of them occurred during a dance competition that I was a part of at a young age. I was maybe ten years old when I was a part of a Bhangra group, which is a style of folk dance that originated in Punjab, India.
Bhangra is a highly energized style of dance, and when you watch a performance, you’ll see that the dancers are smiling really wide and having the time of their lives. This is an important part of the performance, as you’re meant to bring this high energy to the stage so that the audience has a good time.
At one of my dance competitions, my group had just finished performing, and the judges were ready to say their piece. All of the judges had great things to say, except for one that decided to point out a flaw in my personal part of the performance. He said, “Everyone did such an amazing job and were smiling so big and having fun, but you” (points to me, younger Raman) “didn’t seem to be smiling so wide. Why was that?”
As a ten-year-old, my heart dropped as every eyeball in that auditorium looked straight at me. I can’t quite remember what I responded with, but if I’m being honest, I don’t think I said much. I tried to keep it “chill.” I’m pretty sure I just shrugged and said, “I don’t know” while my soul exited my body out of embarrassment, and then eventually walked off the stage with my dance group.
We were young, and we were just having fun with this dance competition. We weren’t trying to win a national championship, and we weren’t even trying that hard to impress the judges. Even though we did end up winning a prize, the critique from that one judge ended up dampening my spirits.
Being singled out from the rest of the group really had an impact on me. Though our mind doesn’t understand why we might experience certain anxieties and fears as we get older, the child that experienced that pain still lives within us.
And the judge from a dance competition becomes an inner judge that critiques us before a work shift as a cashier. “Smile bigger!!!” he says.
It’s both the small moments and big moments of pain that stick around with us. And as much as our adult mind can dismiss the experience by thinking, “Oh, it was just one thing someone said, that’s not a big deal,” to that little kid, it is. It’s a really big deal!
And that leads me to the first myth we have about anxiety: that there’s something wrong with us.
If you have experienced any form of anxiety, there’s nothing wrong with you. Actually, your internal system is working exactly as it was designed! To avoid a possible future “threat” (in this case, the embarrassment from the judge in my story), we create an inner judge to “fix” what was wrong (in this case, not smiling big enough at the dance performance), which will hopefully avoid having someone critique us from the outside (at work).
It’s a weird way that our inner world works, but it’s doing its job. Because the truth is, yes, if you spend twenty-four hours before a work shift to mentally prepare yourself for smiling big at work, then you’ll most likely smile big at work and no one will critique you for being a downer.
Now, when it starts to get really difficult is when you stop having the energy to perform for the world. It becomes extra challenging when your inner critic makes you feel like you’re not enough. It’s usually around this time that people start looking for some help, because even though their inner world is doing its job, it becomes exhausting to keep up with it.
Which leads me to the second myth around having anxiety: that if you have anxiety, you’ll have it forever.
A lot of people believe that if someone gives you a label, that label has to last forever. Not me, though. For example, when my doctor told me I had moderate generalized anxiety disorder, I decided that it wasn’t going to be like that for the rest of my life and that I would do what I needed to do to heal the anxiety.
Anxiety isn’t something you need to “cope” with. I recently suggested a tool to a client, a young woman, and she said, “Oh, yay another coping mechanism!” As excited as she was to try something new, I had to be authentic and let her know that her anxiety wasn’t something she merely had to cope with; it was something that could be transformed.
The first step to transforming your anxiety is getting aware of what your dominant thoughts are. Oftentimes, it’s the hypercritical thoughts that are causing the anxiety. When we can become aware of these thoughts, we can then ask where they originated from.
Just like how I have an origin story for my anxiety, you do too! Oftentimes, there’s more than one origin story—a culmination of origin stories—but it helps to start with one.
The more open you are to healing through your story, and the more willing you are to transform, the more you’ll shift. Your anxiety doesn’t have to be in the driver’s seat of your life forever. It’s even allowed to be a passenger.
And that leads us to the third and final myth around anxiety: that to heal, you must be completely anxiety-free and completely at peace at all times.
The truth is, in my six years of healing, anxiety has popped its head up from time to time. The first time I offered workshops, I was a nervous wreck for weeks.
I’ll still feel anxious if I’m trying something new, but the way I respond is different.
When we start to heal, it creates a strength within us that allows us to show up differently in our life. Even though I felt really nervous to put myself out there in my career, I had the inner strength to go for it! That’s because anxiety was no longer steering the vehicle of my life.
It became a welcome passenger.
The truth is, if anxiety comes from that inner kid and her experiences, then I don’t want to kick her out of the car. That little girl deserves a safe space in my life.
When anxiety pops her head up, I say hello. I journal from her voice, I talk to her, and I let her know it’s going to be okay.
I remind her that I’m the opposite of that judge from that day, and that I will be the one to uplift and empower her. That she is welcome on my journey to show up whenever she wants to. And that I’d love to have her join me for the ride.
I’m here to show her all of the magic that’s inside of her. And I’m here to remind her of her gifts and talents—the ones that no one can take away from her. She is a welcome passenger, and I will be driving the car to our greatest good.
My experience with anxiety and the healing that came along with it has taught me to be kinder to myself, to see the human behind their mask, and to be a walking example of inner peace.
Perhaps the more difficult moments of our life are also the ones that shape us into more of who we’re meant to become.
