The opposite of success isn't failure.

If I were to sit down and think back to all of my failures in life – or more appropriately what I felt were failures – I would automatically start to feel a close kinship with actual garbage. Thinking about moments or situations in which I felt I did something wrong or bad or less than perfect immediately lands me in a place of self-doubt, self-loathing, and feelings of inadequacy.

I don’t think this is a particularly unique scenario for us humans. I certainly hope that most of us don’t doubt our worth or value as an Earth citizen when we think of how our lives have gone… or not gone. But I do think that there are many of us out there who think of their ‘failures’ or ‘mistakes’ and shudder. Let’s talk about that.

I guess I’ll start off by noting that failure is extremely subjective, and I think that is a huge part of the battle when it comes to viewing our own shortcomings. For an anxious and shy 6th grader (ahem, me 15+ years ago), a massive failure would be the equivalent of spilling a glass of water in the cafeteria. A failure may feel massive, and your feeling is your reality. But it also probably isn’t the end of the world to spill a little water.

Time – or where you are in your life developmentally – will also impact how you view a failure. Someone’s idea of failure would most likely be very different at age 60, or age 27, or 81 or 105. However, it is important to note that our earliest experiences in childhood will most likely impact and shape the way we conceptualize what failure is or how someone 'fails.' We carry our experiences and memories with us wherever we go, throughout our life.

Society is also a huge player in the failure game. We constantly have to measure up to a social standard – as if there is a clear-cut way to do something right and not wrong. This pressure is not sustainable, and it certainly isn’t healthy. Of course, there are objectively not good things to do – like hurting someone else or something of a violent nature. In general, though, social norms heavily factor into how we view failure, whether we are consciously aware of that or not.

Taking all of this into consideration, it’s maybe not such a huge surprise that we internalize negative thoughts about ourselves when we don’t succeed at something. After all, we generally consider ourselves to have failed at something if we did not succeed at it. The thing is, I don’t think the opposite of success is failure. That would be too simplistic of a view when it comes to the complexities of our lives in this world. There is so much life to be lived on the journey between failure and success. If we simply say, "THIS is failing, THAT is succeeding," we miss out on all the pretty mess that is life somewhere between those two opposing forces.

I really am not sure if this is making any sense at all, but what I'm basically trying to say is that there’s really no right or wrong way to do life. We don’t have an IKEA booklet on how to assemble our life as if it were a bedside table (wouldn’t that be nice, though?). We don’t have a way of looking into the future to help us decide what path to take in the present moment. The only way to do life is to live it. That may result in us “failing.” Whatever that actually means (I’m more confused than I was before I started writing this), trying at something means we are actively participating in this messy existence.

So maybe just throw away the world “failure” all together. Don’t measure up your efforts to others, to what you think they should be. Just try. Just try. If you didn’t succeed at something, you didn’t fail. You lived, and in the end, I think that’s much more important. Enjoy the ride, because if we focus too much on the destination, we will overlook the journey. The journey is the mess; it’s the good stuff. Keep pushing forward.