For the last six years, I’ve been avoiding a forbidden box in my closet.
Mind you, I am the sole proprietor and prohibitor of the box in question. I packed it when I moved out of the house I lived in during my senior year of college, and since then, I have resolutely refused to look inside. Now it’s been long enough that I think I might genuinely be scared of it.
For my twenty-eighth birthday, I decided enough was enough. It was time to buck up and find out what was in that fucking box! (See: David Fincher's Se7en.)
The year enclosed within those flimsy cardboard walls was one of the most formative and brutal of my life. While the explicit details are tired and unimportant to me now, I seem to cling to an unsubstantiated fear that excavating the physical evidence would defrost a dormant pain etched in my internal code.
Before you panic, I won’t be forcing an extended metaphor about how worthwhile it is to unpack painful memories, to plant them in some sort of memory garden for tending and cultivating. Because, spoiler alert, most of my findings were not that dramatic.
A wrinkled pamphlet to my English graduation. A hair straightener I swore I’d lost. Lots of commemorative cards. A journal filled with poor literary tidbits and creative aspirations. A map of Barcelona. A poem from someone I used to love. Little symbols, little triumphs, little failures.
What I gained from The Grand Opening was a modest epiphany that it was not the old memories, or their associated emotions, that I had so frantically tried to stave off. It was everything that went unrealized—the paths I did not take, the goals I did not achieve, the people I did not keep. The imperceptibly charted course, writhing like a slippery fish in the palm.
When asked why Daft Punk named its 2013 album Random Access Memories, Thomas Bangalter said, “We were drawing a parallel between the brain and the hard drive—the random way that memories are stored.”
Random access memory (RAM), considered to be part of a computer's primary storage, allows data to be read or written in the same time frame regardless of physical location, in contrast to secondary storage like hard disks. But, RAM is also volatile; if a computer loses power, it also loses data.
When I think about RAM, which is unfortunately more often than you’d expect, I think about my forbidden box. About packing away my belongings in no particular order and closing them up so that the data went dark. To properly boot back up, I would need to take stock of the files that had been lost, salvaged, broken. For all those that had saved, there would invariably be those that could never be recovered.
It’s worth noting that I am no stranger to failure. I have failed dependably and almost rhythmically across my pursuits, but perhaps most often in this very creative endeavor. My writing has been rejected from hundreds and hundreds of publications and contests. I went through two rounds of MFA applications batting at a roughly 90% rejection rate. I started this Substack with the intention of publishing regularly enough to increase my reach, but I’ve fallen short at that, too.
Some days, these misfirings carry a familiar twinge—a potent mixture of humiliation and disillusionment—that is unbearable.
Several friends have suggested that my perceived failure rate is a direct result of not knowing exactly what it is I want, and honestly, that’s a fair speculation. A jack of all trades can only be a master of none, or whatever. I’m willing to accept that rank and recognition may be the price of craving a little bit of everything and nothing in particular. After all, Joan Didion wrote in Slouching Towards Bethlehem that, “Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.” I could use a little character!
The thing is, rejection is usually impersonal and unrelated to a person’s overall direction, drive, or skill level. The biggest factor for large-scale achievement is luck, and anyone who tells you otherwise likely just hasn’t zoomed out far enough. But that doesn’t make rejection, or failure at large, sting any less, especially when it feels like you’ve done all the tedious work and preparation necessary to seize luck when it slinks into your line of sight.
I could be a good or even talented writer, but that would make me one amongst a tidal wave of good and talented writers. Even if I knew exactly what I wanted to specialize in and how and when, I’d still be a little fish in need of some serious evolutionary advantage to become the apex predator of my pond. That’s the problem with humans (fish?)—there’s just too damn many of us and not enough good fortune to go around.
Failure sharpens us in the absence of opportunity, then. I’ve come to believe that it is a muscle which must be upkept with an imperfection-rich diet and a regimen of first-timer activities. The more comfortable we are with it, the less likely we are to close ourselves off. To make space for failure is to make space for learning, progress, growth. It is to open up a stupid box sitting at the top of your closet and find an archive of potentialities that are necessarily compromised when one moves across life. Tiny failures, yes, but tiny extravaganzas even more than that.
These ideas remind me of an excellent passage in Lyn Hejinian’s The Book of A Thousand Eyes. I had the honor of taking an undergrad English class from Lyn almost ten years ago. Though I didn’t score well on the first couple papers, she opened my mind and showed me that there were more fruits in the world of words than I ever thought possible. In the book, one of her last before she died in February, Lyn advises the reader to “Fail farther, fail fatter, fail in a particular field of endeavor.”
So, TLDR, I guess: Who says you can’t dilly dally your way to greatness?
Relevant Reading
“Finally, I saw that worrying had come to nothing. / And gave it up. And took my old body / and went out into the morning / and sang.” —Mary Oliver, “I Worried”
Ambiance Music
“If you lose your way tonight, that’s how you know the magic’s right.”
Glad you continue to write and try and fail :) the world is better for it