Happiness through failure-Guest blog

The only way to be happy is to fail.  

But what is that even supposed to mean? 

I believe that one of the secrets of life lies within this apparent contradiction. This truth may not be what you think it is, nor will it be comfortable to attain. Very few people are brave enough to confront this reality, and even fewer have the courage to pursue it. But to do any of this, to find this truth, you have to ask yourself a question: Who am I? 

This is not your college essay prompt. This is not your high-school retreat reflection question. And, full disclosure, it probably won’t make you feel very good either. This is the question you must ask yourself every day when you look in the mirror. Who am I? Who am I right now? Not who I want to be in the future, or who I was before, but who am I now? This is the question that begins your journey to happiness, and by doing this, this is how you uncover where you need to go. Unfortunately, when the vast majority of the population (and often myself included) looks in the mirror, we don’t see ourselves. We see who others want us to be. We see who we think we should be to fit in and to be cool. We see the names that people call us, the suspicions of what other people talk about behind our backs, and we see our past mistakes. 

We see anything but us. A bit frightening, isn’t it? 

Why is this a problem though? After all, you may say to yourself, my life is comfortable, I have friends, and I seem to fit in at school. I’m fine with being the person it takes to maintain what my life is like, even if there is a nagging suspicion it isn’t my own reflection who looks back at me. But, there’s a problem with this thought: if it’s not you that you see in the mirror, it’s an illusion. It’s fake. What we need to understand in a time in which the lives and thoughts of other people are constantly projected onto us is that there is something deeply and fundamentally wrong with not looking at who you really are. To find out if you don’t see yourself in the mirror, you simply need to ask yourself one thing: are you living to make others happy or to make yourself happy? To clarify, there is nothing wrong with cheering people up and helping people. These are extremely noble aspirations. But for a second, you need to be selfish. Ask yourself, “am I living on my own terms? Who is really controlling my life?” 

For me, the answers to these questions were rather uncomfortable. This was not a particularly joyful experience, nor did it make me happy in the moment. I realized that I was taking too much time to worry about what others thought about the choices I made. I worried about how they thought I looked. But what I realized most of all was that my life was a life of fear. To answer the earlier question, I was not living on my own terms, nor was I controlling my own life. Fear was. This is not a fear of ghosts or spiders, but a deep fear of the unknown. This is the fear pervades all of us and is the true force that masks our original selves. What is this unknown though? And why should we be afraid of it? The unknown is rejection. It is a bad grade. It is worrying about what other people think about you. It is a broken relationship, or a barbed comment. It is failure, it is suffering, it is loss. It is anything we think we cannot do. The unknown is a dark place, the place which we would prefer not to go. The unknown sounds pretty bad. Given the circumstances, it seems reasonable to want to avoid it. So why go there in the first place? 

The reason why we must seek the unknown is that while many terrible things lie there, there also lies the potential for something greater. The only way to do something you have never done before is to actually do something you have never done before. For whatever reason, people seem to think that we can achieve greater things while still being comfortable and not reaching beyond ourselves. Why is it that we don’t want to go into this unknown, to go to a place which, by definition, unfamiliar and is uncomfortable to us? The only thing that holds us back from being who we really want to be is fear. Fear stops us from achieving our potential. It is fear that stops us from pushing ourselves a little harder on the next rep or from putting in an extra hour of studying. We fear what will happen to us if we do something that we have never done before. But most of all, we fear failure, of not realizing our full potential.  

I have some good news for you, though: You are supposed to fail. You will fail. You need to fail. You have to fail. 

This is the most comforting news that I have ever received in my life. Now, we have no reason to be afraid of the unknown. We can now dive headfirst into what is uncomfortable, unpleasant, and unknown. We no longer have to worry about taking risks or embarrassing ourselves. What’s the worst that can happen? Failure? We’re supposed to do that anyway, so why on Earth would we be afraid of it? By recognizing fear’s effect on our lives, we now have the tools to confront it. It may seem strange to classify every event in your life as a struggle between fear and the unknown, but this is what we must do in order to truly confront our fears. And when we know how to confront fear, we ultimately regain our power of choice. This is scary, and it takes courage. After all, the definition of bravery is overcoming fear. The cost of confronting fear is being uncomfortable, but we gain an incredible treasure: we can live life on our own terms and not be controlled by the external factors of our circumstances. We no longer have to worry about who is better than us or if we are good enough ourselves. When we choose, we get to live as we want and be who we really want to be. 

This is happiness. This is what allows us to look in the mirror and see ourselves. Now, we can know who we really are.