Love Note #4: The Joy of Failing into Authenticity
Reflections on Saturn Returns, letting go, and beginning again.
Hey there,
I hope each and every one of you reading this is safe, healthy, and divinely protected, financially, spiritually, and physically. I hope the immeasurable grief that we are all carrying feels lighter each day.
It’s been a long time. So much has changed, and yet so much is the same. The last time I wrote a Love Note, a global pandemic was unfathomable, and a different racist white man was president.
But, I’ve come to talk about failure. The cold, hard, and unyielding evidence of how we mortally meet our inadequacies, shortcomings, and fears. & some of this isn’t ours: it’s intergenerational wounds that run through our bloodlines. Other times it’s trauma we’ve inherited through scarcity.
Although there are many times in our lives when we feel the weight of time pressing up against our human experience, the late 20s is a cultural rite of passage that asks us to reckon with our inevitable maturation (Saturn Return). For some of us nearing this threshold, we feel ourselves running out of time to accomplish things we thought we would have already achieved by 30.
Whether we realize we set an impossible goal for ourselves or we didn’t put in the necessary work to attain it, there’s a moment when a painful pang reverberates through our bodies. It reminds us that despite our best efforts, the things we aspired to be and do, have not materialized. We feel like we have nothing to show for our ambitions.
Maybe you’ve been comparing yourself to your peers who are married with children. Maybe you are comparing yourself to a former version of you, who was bolder, unafraid, and was a little less battered by the systems that structure our lives.
Photo by Hello I'm Nik 🎞 on Unsplash
For whatever reason, time bested you, caught up with you, or eluded you all together. It’s time to let go of whatever it is that you are carrying around you like a corpse or an extra limb as proof of your inadequacy. Let go of who you think you ‘should’ be. And the most difficult task is still ahead of you: in your self-assessment, resist the urge to judge yourself for what you did not yet know. Refuse to abandon yourself. This process is about looking at ourselves fearlessly and unflinchingly as we are, refusing to run from the truth of ourselves, however messy, ugly, and terrifying.
But, as the title of this #LoveNote suggests, this is about both joy and failure.
It's about the radical and liberatory insights that await us after we fail dramatically, publicly, and irreparably. We have an opportunity to unwrap the gift of failure and make our losses our greatest lessons. When we take a look at the places in our lives where ‘the math is not mathing,’ we have a few options:
Commit to the delirious quality of greatness. Renew ourselves once again to a dream that once ignited us. Throw ourselves into that dream, taking the small but necessary steps against time to build brick by brick the impossible quality of bravery. Here we summon courage and faith not bound in what the eyes can see, but rather what the soul remembers.
There is another option. We compassionately look at the life unlived ahead of us and sum it up with the life we’ve actually lived. We allow our failures to gloriously lead us into a deeper self-knowing. We remind ourselves that life is deliciously long. Our past does not have to be a prescription for the rest of our lives. We get to begin again. However clumsily and indecipherable we fall, we get to begin again. And there is enough room to grow and glow. There are places still left to go.
What I’m suggesting is that maybe failure is the ultimate gift when we are up against time. What we link to our successes might actually reveal itself to be rooted in a moment we decided we never wanted to feel or experience a certain thing again. Maybe the most authentic version of ourselves isn’t waiting behind all of the things we do well —maybe it’s behind our failures.
Are you hiding in a life that exhausts you because you don’t have the courage to fail? Even if it might bring you closer to the truth of your calling? What do you say yes to over and over again, knowing that you want to scream NO?
First, we have to admit we failed. We failed. Say it out loud:
“I failed, but I am not done yet.”
Pick up your failures and shortcomings and devour them. Wear them around your neck like bones of the contradictions you, your ancestors, and the universe cooked up on a pre-earthly plane.
May every righteous NO help you to embody a divine YES.
May you let unending exhaustion lead you to deeper rest.
Thank you for journeying with me! I hope there’s something here for you. I’m rooting for you. I believe in you.
May you soar, beam, and thrive.
Love,
Steph Gee
@LoveStephGee
A Parting Word & Some Quotes
2 Corinthians 4:16-18 (MSG)
So we’re not giving up. How could we! Even though on the outside it often looks like things are falling apart on us, on the inside, where God is making new life, not a day goes by without his unfolding grace. These hard times are small potatoes compared to the coming good times, the lavish celebration prepared for us. There’s far more here than meets the eye. The things we see now are here today, gone tomorrow. But the things we can’t see now will last forever.
We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.—Joseph Campbell
Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room. —Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore.—Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
If you feel moved to give a love offering, thank you, I am $LoveStephGee on CashApp and Venmo.
I am still closed for readings until the end of February, but I will have some new offerings in March that I’m very excited about.
Originally posted via Substack on Jan 28, 2021.