The Courage to Fail

“I would recommend taking this class again,” the teacher said to me as the sewing class wrapped up.

I could feel eyeballs burning through my skull while I bowed my head in embarrassment and retreated to my car. 

Because I had mentioned I wanted to try my hand at sewing, my family had pitched in to get me a sewing machine that Christmas, and while I knew nothing about sewing machines, it looked like they had spared no expense. I better put this thoughtful gift to good use I thought, so I registered for a “Know Your Machine Class” at a sewing studio a couple of towns over. 

When I arrived at class, we went around the room to introduce ourselves.

“I’m making my prom dress,” a teenager mentioned.

Each person that followed shared their own project in the works. Quickly it became clear —their sewing machines might’ve been new to them, perhaps an upgrade from a beginner set or their first machine after spending time hand sewing, but they were not novices like me.

The teacher rattled off instructions on how to thread the machine. Now we would do it on our own. My classmates seemed to easily master the steps, while I quickly fell behind. Wait, where do I carry the thread over to again? Was I supposed to do this after that? I referred to my short-hand notes on a scrap piece of paper, but with my classmates and teacher watching me (a recipe for disaster for my highly sensitive soul), my nerves had rattled down to my hand rendering the cheat sheet illegible.

The instructor continued to remind me (and I imagine I must’ve had the machine’s instruction book there, too), but I couldn’t recall the order and placement. My mind was like a sieve, a point my husband would argue as he is sure to share with all that we meet that I can remember any conversation from years prior, including the date and words exchanged. But that was about relationships, a subject my brain more readily absorbed and filed away in the appropriate drawer. Apparently, machines were different and that information, instead, scattered on the floor of my brain with no folder file in sight.

My eyes filled with tears from humiliation and frustration. Why can’t I get it? Failure stings.

I returned home and never took the machine out again, except to take the photo above. It remains downstairs in my basement on a craft cabinet collecting dust, its insides gunked up from age and lack of use. The truth is my intentions were pure. I did want to learn, but apparently, my giant-sized humiliation outweighed any snack-sized interest.

This technically wasn’t my first failed sewing foray, although it had been decades. In elementary school one year our assignment was to stitch the outline of our state (New Hampshire) marking an “X” where we lived, the state flower (lilac), and the state tree (birch), or some combination of those is what my memory recalls. My best friend’s creation was perfection as usual thanks to her natural artistic flair; mine not so much.

I am a quilt of repeating patterns when it comes to failure in home economics. Knitting was also a no-go for me, despite my sister’s stellar instruction, a handy learn-to-knit kit from Reader’s Digest as a Christmas gift one year, and adorable spools of yarn begging to be used. I also had a run-in with my mother-in-law’s hand-me-down bread machine. After following the directions and allowing the allotted time to pass, I looked in the machine and found liquid goo with no formed bread in sight. I fell to the kitchen floor in tears. Maybe there was no hope for me. Neither the knitting needles nor the bread machine have been invited back to play.

I’ve thought about why those failures in particular hit so deeply; perhaps it’s because they challenged an unconscious idea I held of what it means to be a woman.

The women in my family all effortlessly engage in some combination of sewing, knitting, quilting, or cooking, while, for me, none necessarily feel natural or overly enjoyable.

In “What Exactly Do We Learn From Failure?” by Radu Atanasiu Ph.D. in Psychology Today, Atanasiu points to three things we need to ask ourselves about failure: “what assumption proved not to be true, what is true instead, and what do we need to do about it.” He breaks this down into three clear statements: “Before the failure, I thought that (…), but then I realized that (…); now, I do (…).”

So what is true instead for me is that I am free to create my own version of womanhood based on my unique personality and gifts, and what I need to do is embrace that unapologetically. And to keep me honest, I’ve added Atanasiu’s three statements to my dry-erase board in my office because, let’s face it, I know I will need the reminder.

If you need a few more quick tips on how to make failure work for you,

Arash Emamzadeh helps us out in “5 Science-Based Techniques to Learn From Failure” in Psychology Today. He provides a summary chart on the emotional and cognitive barriers of failure which includes techniques such as removing your ego or strengthening it, learning to expect failure, understanding how analyzing failure requires more effort than analyzing success, and acknowledging how your culture and personality affect your motivations (are you motivated by fear of failure or by achievement).

So for those especially hard days when we want to hide our internal sewing machine in a dark corner that will never see the light of day, we can first take the moment we need to press pause on life for a day of movies, ice cream, and maybe even a steady repeat of Andra Day’s song “Rise Up,” and then resume our trying once more.

But only after we take the time to courageously examine our failure in the light.

Failure has begun to taste a bit sweeter for me in one area—writing. Perhaps because when you really love something in your soul, nothing will drag you away. Stephen King in his book On Writing mentions that, in his younger years, he hung his many rejection slips on a nail on his wall and continued writing. I’ve seen other writers share their rejection letters on social media as a badge of honor to illustrate they are doing the work, showing up time and time again. I received my first rejection letter recently and you know what? I’m still breathing and typing, so that’s promising.

How do you react to your own failure?
How do you react to the failure of others?
What’s something important enough to you that you’re willing to risk failure?

For related resources, see The Alchemist book review, How To Think Like Einstein: Simple Ways to Break the Rules and Discover Your Hidden Genius book review, Paulo Coelho quote on fear, and poem “Games with Life”.