What is failure anyway?

So some people don't like that I've called myself a failure in the title.  I've gotten such sweet comments as to suggest I'm an adventurer, not a failure, or my personal favorite, an anomaly (...um, thanks dad ;) ).  There's more to it than the self-deprecation blog-land allows.  Let me explain. 

When I first started this whole grad school process, I thought having to take another year was THE worst thing that could happen along the way.  It was something I had feared from the very first mention of the word.  So when it happened, that's exactly what I felt--a failure.  Now yes, there were other feelings along the way (including some great conversations with my grandma about her seeking vengance for me with her cane.  If you know my grandma then this makes sense.  If not, just imagine it, she'll be 90 this summer...) but failure was the main one.  And then I stopped.  Really, was this such a big deal in my life?  Yeah, it sucks, but THE worst thing that could happen?  No.  In fact, I'd already had an enormous wakeup call in my family with a record-breakingly huge spleen and a little unknown-to-me chromosome named after a Pennsylvania city (or a cream cheese, your call) earlier in the year.  It took me about .5 seconds to put it all together.  Granted, I let myself indulge in the self-pity I felt and the other-pity I was getting, but my perspective was changed.

Let's face it, we all fail.  Every day we fail at things big or little.  And if you're not failing, you're not taking enough risks.  For me, this is just about facing and embracing that failure, not catastrophizing it, and having fun doing it.  So I'm proud to say it, I'm a failure, everyday, and I will continue to be.  But I am always thankful for the ones in the background trying to prove me wrong.

A Year in the Life of a Failure

I'm starting a new year in my life. No, it's not related to my birthdate or astrological sign. It's not New Year's Eve or Chinese New Year or even Easter. It's just a random day in May. But, I'm getting ready to enter into a new year. Having finished my Ph.D. coursework (ahem...last week, thankyouverymuch) and unable to begin the next phase of professional development until next year thanks to a remarkable imbalance in the system that determines my life, or well, career at least, I have been gifted a year. A WHOLE year! A year of nothingness, with no real responsibilities or expectations. I'm caught in the unknown in-between. I'm calling it my year of failure.

As someone who went straight through Kindergarten (I was a preschool dropout) to Ph.D. studies (21 years of school in all), I've heard the urban legends and stories of people who "take a year off." Most of these involve "finding oneself." Now, I'm 26. I have a general idea of who I am and what I want to do with myself and my life. I know where I live and can even show you on a map. This is not one of those blogs about finding yourself. Instead, I wanted to take what was at once a gigantic professional failure for me (seriously, having to take ANOTHER year?? Four haven't been ENOUGH?) and turn it into something productive, or at least enjoyable. Now, if you know me, this isn't too unusual. I'm generally a glass-half-full kind of person. But I want this to be something bigger than that. Many of my friends are already members of blog world. I enjoy reading them, and thought, hey, I can do this...maybe. So here I am. I struggled for a while to come up with a name for this blog. I kept trying to think of something witty and catchy, with enough drama and grace to be respectable. I failed. So instead, I thought of the purpose of the blog, redefining the failure into something enjoyable and went with that (it's ironic that I failed at my first task of my failure blog, but we'll leave that at that...).

So here's the deal. I'm taking this year to do as many new things as I can, explore, have adventures, and most likely, make mistakes and fail. I have a year to do everything I've always wanted to do that doesn't really matter, and I couldn't be more excited. At the end of this year, I will be embarking on the biggest adventure of my life so far--I'll be marrying the man I love--so I'm using all the little adventures to prepare me for the big one. Feel free to follow along, whether you're a cheerleader hoping I'll make it or a bit of a sadist hoping I won't, you'll probably get a bit of each.