I started a new job this week, after almost two years of on-and-off unemployment.
My joblessness was the result of multiple things in my life failing all at once. Some of them were under my control, some weren’t, but at the end of the day, I carried the accumulation of failures with me, unable to shake them off. The loss of that job meant the loss of the life I’d crafted with so much care, and of a dream I’d worked for incessantly for years.
The end of a dream is a hard reality to face. I’ve talked about this in previous posts already, so I’ll try not to go into it again, but losing my work visa in the UK has to be one of the most soul-crushing moments of my short life so far. I’d started envisioning my life there since I was fourteen, and to see that dream falling apart hit me harder than I dared to admit at the time. It impacted my sense of self in ways I’m only able to realise now, when I find myself finally on the other side. Or at least on my way there.
The past two years have shown me that my inability to cope with something not working out as I had expected was directly related to not having been taught how to deal with failure. I’m not sure whose fault this is, because it seems to me it’s just one of those random situations in life: I just hadn’t failed at many things before this. Not big things, at least; I was always good at school, had good grades, did okay at university, then nailed it at taking the first steps of adulthood. Be it chance or luck, I think I’d sailed through life without many difficulties getting in the way.
So when things went south, how was I supposed to know how to pick myself from the floor and brush it all off?
Experiencing this particular kind of failure left me full of fears and doubts, two things I didn’t have much of when I started planning for this big dream of mine years ago. I wasn’t sure if I was postgraduate material, nor where the money to pay for that degree was going to come from, nor did I ever question if I was capable of living abroad by myself—I simply did what I wanted to do, hoping for the best, no second thoughts. I wish I could be like that again. Instead, my mind is a minefield full of unanswered questions and uncertainties: What if I choose the wrong path? What if this new thing I might want to try doesn’t work out? What if I fuck it all up? What if I fail again?
I want to find answers to those questions. But all I know right now, thanks to some wisdom imparted by my dad, is that failure could happen again. Will happen again. Maybe not now—gosh, please not now—, but eventually. Life is long, and there’s no way things won’t fall apart again. The inevitability of this feels terrifying. And yet, we get back up. I think of all the people around me who keep trying failure after failure after failure, and I feel like the least I can do is try to be a little bit more like them. A little bit more resilient. Instead of letting the fears and doubts and pain and disappointment sink or paralyse me.
So, now I’m trying to move on. Not just because I finally found a job—although that’s a big win and certainly a great help—, but because I can’t keep carrying that failure with me. I lived it, hopefully learned from it, and it should now be left in the past: as a lesson, and also as proof that, somehow, I managed. Maybe that way I can let go of some of the fear, and replace it with enough courage and excitement to get out there again.