Rising Up from Failure
Hello Readers,
Happy September! Don’t you love the smell of sharpened school pencils in the Fall?
Please feel free to read my newest writing below or listen to the audio version included here.
Love,
Olivia
This summer, I spent seven weeks sleeping in foreign beds far away from home. Endless travel between states, countries and continents seems exotic and shiny, but is laced with too many cups of Starbucks chai and jetlag.
After 22 years of living overseas, experiences bleed together. I don’t remember where I tasted that great baklava near the Bosphorus strait in Istanbul; can’t recall exactly where we pushed a stroller to calm a screaming toddler along the canals of Amsterdam.
One feeling, though, is unforgettable–no matter where I go, I’m always a foreigner. Locals can tell I’m not from their neck of the woods. I don’t know what tips them off–the way I don my socks, the type of shoes I wear, the color of my eyes, shape of my nose, or some sort of attitude that hits the local air differently.
But in July, while driving through the fought-over border crossing between Greek and Turkish Cyprus, I felt there was a part of me that knew this place. We’d entered the green zone–established by peacekeeping forces during a war for the rule of the northern half of Cyprus. The neighborhoods surrounding the border crossing had once been vibrant.
Moms held hands with school-aged children crossing streets. Grandpas sat across from one another at a chess table. They drank coffee, laughed about some story involving an old friend now gone, and spent most of their time staring down at the board determining the next great move. But now, buildings are vacant; dogs run wild in their packs of mutts without a home.
I pulled back the pleated curtain of the bus’s window, and I saw the loss of dreams.
There was a summer home that stood naked—pillars with strands of steel rebar exposed, cement floors that never were tiled. The unfinished home had eyes—open holes without glass. They’d miss the opportunity to have a Turkish grandma slam the window shut from fear of catching cold. She is on constant guard against the famous “draft” that is known to kill young and old in this part of the world.
A family purchased a plot of land. Saved. Approved building plans. Proudly stood by as a crew with hardhats poured cement to build their dream home near the sea. Now it stands unfinished; alone for years. Maybe the money dried up or the war took its beauty away. But, a dream died.
A few miles later, we left the green zone and entered into the life of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Our mini-bus, with its seats covered in itchy carpet squares, drove through a small city’s main street just minutes away from a grand beach-side hotel.
There was a nail salon with floor to ceiling glass at its entrance. Bright pink paint on walls and white-tiled floors. Once a young woman had a dream to open this salon. She envisioned pedicure tubs filled with the feet of wealthy nearby hotel guests; listening to the latest gossip from friends she went to school with—now all paying to pamper themselves in her Barbie-core salon.
It’s empty now–no foot baths or swivel chairs on wheels. The nail-painting desks were sold to some office complex. The doors are locked, its hot-pink neon sign taken down. Another dream died.
I am also someone who spent years working towards a dream and had to bury it. You can read the three chapters I shared about that loss.
The death of dreams is a part of breathing oxygen. We were created to dream. Told to dream. And sometimes dreams come true, and often, they don’t. And no one ever taught us how to say goodbye–how to rise up from failure and dream again.
I’m no expert. I still see a therapist every other week. Each time I drive the 30 minutes to sit in her pink velvet chair next to an end table with a fake plant growing out of a corgi dog’s back, I hope to announce that I’m healed; free; no longer in need of therapy. And one hour, and a pile of Kleenex later, I am reminded that I am still healing. Still learning to rise.
Through tears, through depression, through not really seeing a purpose to keep living, through the knee-jerk reaction to take my life by its horns and force it into my plan, these are some of the things I learned. Maybe we can learn together….
1. Life is guaranteed to bring us both joy and suffering. But we must learn to mourn, heal, and rise again.
“All I want is to be happy. I just want my kids to be happy.” —The mantra of our generation
But as Arthur Brooks, Harvard happiness researcher, writes:
“Happiness is not our goal and unhappiness is not our enemy. [...] If you believe you have to eradicate your feelings of unhappiness before you start getting happier, you’re going to be unnecessarily held back by the perfectly normal negative feelings of everyday life, and you're going to miss out on understanding what makes you you.”
The good news is that joy comes for us all.
The bad/good news is suffering comes for us all.
Life is like the two steel rails of a railroad track. Our wheel’s bounce and balance back and forth between the victories and pains of life. If we expect anything different, then we will become another tragedy of a high speed train—flattened when life does not meet our expectations for happiness.
We learn to soak in the good; store it up in our bellies for a harsh winter. When the cold wind keeps its promise to come and bombard us, it convinces us that summer will never come. We must speak to our soul; remind it that good will come again. We become more powerful, an echo of the unshakable Creator, only through experiencing winters and summers; joy and suffering.
While living in Armenia for eight years, I experienced a country that knows how to mourn through loss. My American culture taught me to cry a bit, but within a few weeks I’m expected to do what we do best in the Wild West—“pull myself up by my own bootstraps.” Unlike the Armenians, who wail at the graveside, wear black and don’t shave for 40 days, I was never taught how to say goodbye to something that had been a part of me. The few times I have let grief show, it was embarrassing. Everyone noticed the ugly cry, felt uncomfortable, and I was left apologizing for my weakness.
When I was trapped in that spa hotel’s public restroom, sitting on a closed toilet lid and crying for the decades I had lost of a dream, I began to mourn after years of telling myself the loss was insignificant. I allowed myself to grieve something that seems trite to many but, to me, was like one of those steel rebars in the pillars of the abandoned seaside home. The dream of singing had been woven into every part of me since I first realized vocal chords could slap together and make noise.
My desire to perform was not sinful, prideful or self-absorbed. A young child who refuses to go ride bikes outside with friends, but LOVES to sit on a pillow watching musicals recorded on VHS tapes, dancing along and singing at the top of her lungs—this was a God-given, created love and purpose. And in my desire to serve God, to throw everything out BUT his will, I somehow lost his will. Decades I cannot retrieve or rewrite.
And, I’m allowed to mourn it.
You are too.
We NEVER get to be the great evaluators of which losses are worth a person mourning or not; society hasn’t earned that privilege either.
As it’s said, it’s only once we allow ourselves to “feel the feels” that we can “take the wheel.” We learn to say goodbye to one dream, take time to care and pour water on the dried-up soil. Only then another root can find its place. A new dream can grow.
2. “The middle is messy, but it’s where the magic happens.”- Brene Brown
Anyone who has courage, and tries to make a dream a reality, is guaranteed to come face-to-face with failure. Stephen King received 80 publisher rejections for his first book that eventually became an international best-seller. The respected writer C.S. Lewis received 800 rejections for his first book.
What we often perceive as success stories, as dreams come true, are actually people rising up, again and again, from failure. Learning from the fall. Editing life and words. Forced to let go of one dream to find a mightier one. Accepting pain as an expected part of the journey and trying again…knowing that joy will come!
This part of dreaming, of healing, feels more like choosing to wake up and take a simple step in the right direction. Sometimes that’s all we have in us–one measly step.
The truth is: it’s all that’s needed.
This part, the step-by-step healing, is the middle of our story.
And for all of us who love to read a novel, the beginning is meant to hook us with its plot line. The ending of the story leaves a distinct aftertaste. But all the pages in between–the middle–are long and sometimes lull us to sleep on late nights. But it's in these middle pages that the characters are built, the story formed. It’s where the magic happens.
Are you in the middle of your story? Your dream? Your healing?
What’s your next small step?
3. We are not alone.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; [...] who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.” - Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech
We dare greatly. We fall. But when we look up from the dusty arena floor, we’re not alone. First, we notice the yells of the spectators–the ones not risking their lives. They’re seated in the stands consuming popcorn and diet Cokes. Their criticism easily becomes our inner voice.
Remember: they don’t know what the battle feels like.
Instead, we look at those inside the arena with us–fellow dreamers, failures, companions. Selected for us. And God has given us to them.
When I’m so sad I cannot take that one step from my bedroom mattress to the hardwood floor, my husband Nick floods the room with happy music, blinds me with sun lamps, and reminds me of my purpose. He says the world needs me, and I start to believe they do.
I’m never alone because the God of the winds is by my side. Sometimes he slows me down or protects me by getting me off course. At other times, he stands behind me and blows. With his wind at my back, one step of healing or dreaming is turned into miles.
The biggest lie you can ever believe is that you can never dream again. That you will never heal. That you are alone.
But help will not always find you if you stay slumped over in the dust of the arena floor. You, dear one, must REACH.
Reach for someone else. Reach for a therapist. Reach for healing. Reach out for God with ugly cries and mumbled prayers you’re not sure you even believe.
Ask him to help you dream again; to give you companions for the journey.
It sure is messy, but keep on reachin’. Keep on steppin’. Magic is about to happen.
Those who subscribe or read my work via Substack get additional content—a list of questions to help you journal and determine you next steps to healing, dreaming again, rising up. You can subscribe for free or a paid subscription below.