MABA and the pursuit of failure
Or: if you drop a big fish, pick the damn thing up and laugh.
Ten days until we Make America Burpee Again. Have you signed up yet?
I love you dear MABA reader and I hope at some point during MABA you hate me. I hope you reach a point of burpee failure. Not catastrophic failure. Not why-is-my-leg-bent-this-way failure. But I-can’t-do-another-burpee failure. Better, I-won’t-do-another-burpee-because-I’m-fried-mentally failure.
I hope you put your hands on the ground, kick your feet behind you and just stop. I hope you say eff this I’m done with these effing burpees. Eff those jackwagons in St. Charles who came up with effing Make America effing Burpee Again, eff burpees, eff these gloves, eff that ground, eff all of you.
And then I hope you stand up, hug the man next to you, and do more burpees.
Among the many things I’ve learned in the eight years as a freelance writer is that I suck at failing.
I’m trying to change. I want to fail better. For far too much of my life, I would simply get mad and learn little except how to stew in my own bitterness. (I’m quite skilled at that.) I’m not as bad as I used to be, but I still need work.
I failed often in 2021. Some of the time, more than I care to admit, it was by omission, meaning I simply didn’t do something I should/could have. But there was plenty of commission, too. A short list: Two business ventures I was excited about went nowhere. (A third still has promise.) I burned myself out, physically and mentally, and had to withdraw from GrowRuck a few weeks before it started. And the story I was most excited about in 2021 turned into a mess, one of the top two frustrations of my freelance career.
I allowed the client to treat me poorly, and instead of standing up for myself, I just took it. I was trying to be agreeable and instead got walked over. On top of that, I didn’t like the final product; I wish I could do it over (though admittedly A. because of my frustration about how I was treated I’m not a good judge of it and B. peers I shared my frustrations with tell me I’m over-reacting.)
My anger was still white-hot a few weeks later when I sensed a similar circumstance unfolding. This time, I stood up for myself. While I can’t promise I won’t let myself get screwed again, at least I learned how to prevent it.
As a self-employed writer, most of my failure happens in secret. For years, I kept it that way. When (not if) I blow a story, I’m often the only one who knows. Usually the story I turn in is fine/good enough. But sometimes there’s a story I missed—a story I should have told that could have been great that only I know was there for the grabbing. I could still hide all of that from everyone if I wanted to. I’m trying to not do that.
The two photos I used today illustrate this. They were taken seconds apart. That’s a 28.5 inch, 12-pound cutthroat trout that I pulled out of Pyramid Lake in Nevada in November. We (by which I mean I) pretend as if our lives are all the bottom one—big smile, big fish, ain’t life inexpressibly grand. But there are many, many awkward moments where we drop the damn thing. The smiling picture is meaningless—fiction, even—without the dropping picture.
Someone who saw the smiling picture wants to use it in promotional material. But life is really more about the dropping picture and what comes next. Dropping the fish is not the point. The point is picking the damn thing back up.
I know I will fail at some point during MABA, and so will you. That’s by design. I hope there is a friend, or preferably many friends, standing there to pick your sorry rear end up. I hope you do the same for them. Because as bad as failing is, failing alone is far worse.
That’s why MABA’s theme is Fall down. Get back up. Together. MABA is not about the burpees. It’s about the people we do them with. Sign up here.