I have never been good at failure. Up until recently, that is. For most of my life, even the slightest failure meant complete defeat to me. I 
would often just give up and move on, leaving a trail of unresolved failures behind me. I guess no one ever taught me about how the most successful people often experience many failures – and learn from them. Or maybe I just didn’t hear the lesson. Or maybe I heard it, but didn’t really understand it.
Like so many things in life, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. It seems I’ve become ready to learn about failure: how to find the gift and lesson in each failure; how not to get knocked down so far I can’t get up; how to recognize that there is greater success from failure than I could have without it. In other words, my perspective on failure has changed as I’ve changed. I now see failure as adding rich texture to the tapestry that is my life, rather than a thing that pulls the rug out from under me and lands me on my ass.
For so many years, my ego was so fragile that I felt very defensive about anything resembling failure. Even helpful feedback felt awful. I often lashed out, blaming others and trying to hide my mistakes. I didn’t like myself. I certainly didn’t love myself. And I was harder on me than anyone else ever was.
In the past couple of years, I’ve learned to be gentle on me. I’ve learned to be authentic. I’ve learned to like myself. And even to love myself. It seems kind of late in life, but what the hell? I spent a good five years of my life just regretting the previous 50 – feeling like it was too late to get it right, or even to try. Then one day, it was as if I woke up. And instead of pulling myself up by my proverbial bootstraps, I gave myself a gentle, loving hug. I spoke softly and kindly to me. I told myself that I was awesome, and that there was no one else like me at all – and that’s a good thing. I reminded me that it’s NOT too late. Something shifted, and my fragile, immature ego began to lose its defensive grip on me. My ego began to defer to my soul – my wise, wonderful soul. I began to find the Authentic Me.
I had kept all these feelings of failure, along with shame, guilt. humiliation and fear, hidden in the dark recesses of my being. They were in there, bumping around like ghosts, trying to get out. I thought it would be too scary to look at them, so i didn’t even try. I tried to drink them away with alcohol. I tried to drug them away. I tried to comfort them with food. I tried to release the ghosts with excessive exercise. But those were temporary fixes, and ultimately the ghosts just got noisier. Until I couldn’t stand it any more. And I began to reach out for help.
I’ve begun to learn how to shine a loving, gentle light into those dark places. It’s not nearly as scary as I feared. In fact, there’s gold in there! Now that I know how to look. I’m on a Personal Treasure Hunt that will undoubtedly last the rest of my life. What if the next 50 years feel like “success,” as I embrace my failures and love myself? What if I really DO find Treasure in the darkness? What if I can learn to keep the ghosts out? How cool will that be?