Resolving to Fail

I've never been very good at making New Year's Resolutions, let alone keeping them. The inevitability of failure tends to dissuade me. And who likes failing? Not perfectionists, I can tell you that much, but it also makes life...kind of awful.

No risk of failure means not bothering to try which means doing nothing which means everything stays the same. So if you're already miserable, well, you've assured that you will remain miserable. True, you're not worse off, per se. But where was it decided that failing means you're worse off?

Lots of interesting shit has come out of "failures." Science is filled with them. You know what else failure does? It gives you something to fight for. I may be an outlier here, but doesn't it feel amazing to do something everyone else said you couldn't? Failure can give you that. It can be the voice that says, "You suck at this," but it's your choice whether to roll over and agree with the voice or instead to say, "Fuck you, I do what I want." You can't prove all the people who didn't believe in you wrong without failing first, even if the one of the "people" is yourself.

I've failed at this before, the whole blog writing thing. I may fail at it again. But I'll still have the experience, and I won't have the regret. I can live with failure. Regret? Regret stings and wallows and belches out self-doubt and self-hatred on a regular basis. I have one regret in particular that likes to haunt me on sleepless nights and whisper "what if?" into my ear until I'm a blubbering mess under the covers.

I guess what I'm saying is, I'm not so much resolved to fail as I'm resolving not to regret. I won't make a list, not on here, of all the specific things I want to do (though, trust me, I have one). I'm going to fail at some of the things on there. But I'm not going to regret trying. After all, if you try enough time, statistically you should hit success at some point. You know, like the whole chimpanzees typing out Shakespeare schtick if you give them long enough at a typewriter?

So here's to a year of magnificent failures! In the immortal words of 90's icon Miss Frizzle, "Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!" I think I can manage that.