Life has a way of making us students of the oddest teachers and teaching us lessons in the strangest circumstances. Some weeks ago, I was watching a video on YouTube when one of those pesky ads popped up. As I am not interested in YouTube premium, I had to wait for five seconds to skip the ad. At the end of the five minutes, I knew I had to download the game. The ad was for a mobile game called Fishdom. Thirty seconds into the ad, I found myself on my Google Appstore, downloading the game.
I have always been a sucker for those games that make you think.
Sudoku, MahJong, the whole shebang.
And that’s what I thought this game was.
I was wrong.
Turns out the game was a spin on Candy Crush with aquatic life, colorful aquariums, and shiny rewards. The game structure that drew me in wasn’t the primary structure of the game. That aspect was just for the mini-game. But I had already downloaded it and I was determined to make the best of it until I decided to delete it.
The challenges started off easily at first and I saw myself acing ten levels in less than forty-five minutes. However, things got tougher as the levels advanced. I got to the forty-eighth level some days later and as I was waiting for the game to load, a blowfish appeared on the screen with the words “super hard level”
Yeah right, I thought, rolling my eyes.
I failed that level.
I failed it a couple of times before advancing…with difficulty if I might add.
I met more hard and “super hard” levels. Some I won off the bat. Others I had to waste lives and play for days without winning. Gradually, a game that had been calming for me and helped me relax in-between reading for my DELE exams became a source of stress and annoyance. I wasn’t even invested in the mini-game (which was what drew me to the game in the first place) anymore. The stupid game was easy to ace, but they purposely made some levels so hard. And when you fail those levels, you lose rewards, making it even harder to advance.
It got to a point where I’d exit the game and start afresh when I knew I would fail. I did this because I felt quitting while I was ahead would help preserve my lives.
Again, I was wrong.
I still lost those lives I was intent on preserving.
It was infuriating.
I couldn’t delete the infernal game at this point. I had to find a way to hack it and stop losing so much. I kept at this win-some-lose-big cycle till one day, shortly before I took my exams, I was like “Uchechukwu, what’s wrong with you? It’s just a game, for heaven’s sake. Not life and death.”
I decided to play and give each game my best but still feel comfortable if I lost. I am an overachiever so it was herculean learning to fail at something as simple as a game that was more or less a Candy Crush facsimile with under-the-sea undertones. I kept at it for days and at some point, it caught on. Asides from the swift, “Shit” when I fail, I am more or less comfortable with losing at the blasted game.
I am a very laid-back person generally. I go with the flow and sometimes wait for “the zing” before I write or make any major decision. This is the “Phleg” part of my personality. However, I am a Mel-Phleg and can sometimes be anal about winning and getting things right the first time. This is one of the many reasons University was hard on me and why I experience this all-consuming fear of failure.
UNN taught me how to fail. This is a running joke I have with some of my close friends, but it is also the truth. I failed so much in University I overcame my fear of failure. Yes, I was a slow learner in kindergarten and the first term of primary one but after that, I picked up and never looked back. In secondary school, I was among the demographic that aced exams comfortably and confidently. I left for University bags packed, eyes shining, and sure as hell it was going to be a flawless victory.
Life: Hey, have you met my friend? Her name is Carryover, but she goes by Carrie most of the time.
I remember the first time someone told me they failed three courses at once. The girl in question was a third-year student of Crop Science. I was a teenager fresh out of secondary school and couldn’t for the life of me understand how someone could fail that many courses at once.
“Wait, like you didn’t read or what? I don’t understand.”
She smiled that smile of someone in on a closely kept secret, a secret kept from innocent freshers, before saying, “It’s complicated. You won’t understand.”
Boy, did I understand later!
By the time I was done with Uni, UNN gave me what I like to call low academic esteem. The unique thing about failing a course in my department is that some courses we did were prerequisite courses. Once you failed them, not only did you have to rewrite them the next year, you also would not be able to write the higher level equivalents with your mates. Five years earlier, I would have called myself intelligent without hesitation. Four years, some carryovers, an extra year, and a 2’2 later, my answer to “Are you intelligent?” would be “I don’t like labels✌✌.” It took a while (and a lot of research and studying) before I regained confidence in my abilities.
While I learned the importance of failing (and standing) in academics, the fear of failure still persisted in other areas of my life. With writing, one bad or “meh” review could sour the taste of nine outstanding ones. With relationships, romantic and otherwise, I didn’t bother trying to start something. The way I saw it, you cannot fail if you don’t start. I was like the proverbial donkey, standing between two bales of hay and choosing to starve because of fear and “what ifs”.
Those rare times when I tested the waters, I got rope burns from holding on to relationships that should have been left to die and carpet burns from digging my feet in to stop them from leaving. Once I started and it failed, I always believed it was my fault. In my way of thinking, failure was the horizon. There was nothing beyond it. I had to learn the hard way that friendships and relationships are not fairytales.
Sometimes it doesn’t last forever.
Sometimes you don’t skip off into the sunset singing.
Sometimes, it ends in premium tears instead of happily ever after.
And that’s a-okay!
It’s not my fault. It just wasn’t meant to be.
Like G.K. Chesterton put it, angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. Failure is just a part of life. It is not that deep. These days, I am getting more comfortable with trying and failing (intelligently). It is not an easy journey. Sometimes, I backslide. Sometimes, I get so afraid of failing I run into my shell. Or afraid of missing out on the few good sides of toxic relationships that I make excuses for them.
But I have learned not to beat myself up for failing at learning to fail with grace. What matters is how I handle the situation ultimately. Failure is only failure when it is not succeeded by progressive, positive change. Failure becomes final when you don’t learn from it or obsess over it. Failure becomes absolute when it deters you from taking risks. There is this saying by John Shedd that I have come to love. It says:
“Ships in harbor are safe but that’s not what they are built for.”
When you have a fear of failure, taking risks can leave you petrified even when you know fulfillment is at the other side of fear. It is important to view our “failures” not as failures but as learning opportunities.
The end of that relationship is not a failure, but a novel opportunity to get into a new, more fulfilling relationship.
That rejection is not failure but an opportunity to do things a different way and try with a different company, publisher, or person.
Failing that course is an opportunity to relearn it, get better at it and ace it next time.
This whole line of thinking may sound too happy-go-lucky and too Pollyanna for many people. It did to me at first, but it does work. It makes failure seem less daunting and more positive. In thinking this way, you stop being a victim of failure and become a product of it, a success story.
So what about you? Do you have a fear of failure? Has it stopped you from taking leaps in your career, relationships, and life? I’d love to hear your story.
Like what you read? Check out Help, My Twenties Are Killing Me and Multipotentialism, and The Kaleidoscope World of Scanners.
