Failing Upwards
The elephant in the room is squatting in the house.
It’s something most people don’t like to talk about.
And rightfully so. Who wants to accept that the deck is stacked against them, or that their success is purely based on the fact that they were eased in -
Financially, socially, culturally.
The elephant is named nepotism, and it’s shitting over all of us.
Even those it benefits.
It is what it is. This ain’t a rant against anyone whose career was launched on the wings of some golden mound of poop. We all need to make our way in anyway we can.
This is a reminder to all of us climbing through the mudslide of disadvantage that there’s no other way to do it other than to keep climbing.
I know it’s hard. There are so many days when everything feels heavy. When every stroke on the keyboard is a Herculean task, each finger weighed down by thousand pound finger-traps that are biting you with the force of a rabid crocodiles.
But when that’s going down, you have two options: let them eat you, or make friends with them and ask them how you taste.
The former may be a release, but it also means all your dreams will never come true.
The latter is gonna hurt. It’s gonna hurt like the furnaces of hell. But if you can endure, you’ll come out stronger, better, and more beautiful than you can possibly imagine.
The worst part about all of this is you’re going to fail repeatedly on this climb. You’re going to slip and fall and tumble ass-backwards, sometimes even further down from the place where you started.
It sucks.
No other way around it.
But one day something is gonna hit.
And when that thing does, people are going to see the trail you cut through the avalanche of despair and follow you up it. And then they’ll look through your failed trails and follow those, too, because there’s wisdom is failure. There’s beauty. There’s will and wonder and all that lame shit.
You’ll reach the top and find that amazing view is actually something you created.
I know — some people really don’t deserve what they got. But you can’t change that. All you can change is your fortitude. And you can do it. See that mountain? It’s there for you to climb.
