Fear of Failure

“A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions–as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

I know that I’ve talked about failure before (mostly because I’m kind of an expert at it), but today I’m looking at the fear of it and how that can affect us, on not just an emotional side but the physical as well.

The human brain is wired for survival. Which means, its really good at flooding us with chemicals to help us outlive the tiger in the grass. It gives us a healthy fear of risk, so that we can live another day to make fire, hunt and gather, and make more big-browed babies. The problem is that some of the deep seated responses and reactions are no longer as useful in our present day. So often, our overstimulated brains are inundated with stress-response chemicals at every little infraction. Boss angry? Jerk cut you off in traffic? Partner says ‘we need to talk’? All of these things can cause an immediate fear response.

Sometimes it’s still helpful, but on the whole it shuts down our ‘thinking’ brain which is a much slower, more thoughtful contributor to our actions. What does it have to do with failure?

Let’s talk about the concept of ‘worst case scenario’. All the mom’s in the crowd know what I mean. You’re child is playing on the playground, but you’ve already mapped out every sharp edge, every eye-poking branch, and every potential bully. Because we’re wired to look for danger and to prepare ourselves for the worst things that can happen. Even if they never do.

Switch over to that manuscript, or poem, or article on your computer that you’ve been working and reworking, and fussing over for years. You have a genuine fear that if you let it out of your sight, it’s going to get poked in the eye with a sharp stick, or fall off of the faulty ladder and break every bone in it’s body. So you keep it safe, you keep it to yourself.

Can you imagine a kid that never, ever left home? That never stepped out, that never met anyone else? That wouldn’t be much of an existence and the world would miss out. Unlike your own child, your writing will not die if you expose it to some danger. In fact, it’s through this ‘danger’ that it will grow, learn, and become better.

So, when you’re trying to decide about submitting, or putting your work in a critique group, remember that its normal to feel apprehensive but that the point of using our voice, of writing what we love, is so that we can share it. And the worst case scenario is really that someone else doesn’t like it. Here’s a little insight-it doesn’t matter if they don’t. If they have good feedback that makes sense and would improve it, great–but don’t let the fear of not being instantaneously accepted keep you from trying. Every work is not for every body. But you won’t know which body it will speak to, if you never let it out.

So–go get ’em. Take that piece to a critique group, give it to a friend to read, submit it to a magazine. Just don’t let the fear keep it (and you) in a cave.