Failure Is My Favorite F-Word

"The burden of having to succeed has evaporated."

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

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Before I serve, I spin the volleyball in my left hand. I can feel the ball’s evenly spaced ridges across my palm. It’s a sensation as familiar as the flat side of a number two pencil resting on my right ring finger – both holdovers from my childhood embedded in my brain and muscles. I toss the ball into the air and my right arm, without much prodding, swings back, then around, and down. The ball clears the net and lands with a thud on the tawny gym floor.

At 34, I am back on the court for the first time in 20 years. I am less agile, less flexible, and much slower. But I also play with an ease that was never there before.

The burden of having to succeed has evaporated. There’s no chance a Division One college will recruit me. I am not vying for a starting position on an elite team. I am here to move my body, to challenge myself, and to connect with others.

My game has rapidly improved over a few short weeks of consistent play. My serve lands where it should six times in a row, instead of just twice. I get underneath an opponent’s spike with both arms, instead of watching the ball fall out of reach. I don’t care how it looks while I do it. I don’t care if my arms flail or my back hurts tomorrow. I don’t care if I miss the spike or dive too far left.

The shackles of success no longer hold me back. My self-imposed mile markers of achievement no longer apply. The rules have changed, and how I gauge a win or a loss is far less scathing than it once was.

It reminds me of my writing practice.

At 34, I am writing consistently, submitting, and publishing. This comes after years of thinking, hoping, dreaming, waiting, and wishing that I might magically turn into a writer, all while doing very little writing.

I feared the commitment of practice. I feared that by practicing, I would be pledging to a dream that I wanted so much, I would rather never try to have than fail at making it come true. I know now that practice is the only viable way to improve.

I missed the joy that comes from simply trying.

Gone are the opportunities to publish a novel before 30. My first short story won’t land in The New Yorker. (But it did end up in the kind hands of the Inquisitive Eater – and for that I am very thankful and proud.) The things I thought might define success as a writer are not available to me any longer, and yet for the first time in my life, I truly think of myself as a writer. The (albeit smaller) victories I have won, coupled with the immeasurable worth of the self-exploration and creative outlet that writing offers, have a greater value than I ever imagined.

As a freshman in high school, I walked away from a starting spot on the junior varsity volleyball team after ending my first season on the bench. Failure is a full body experience for me. It tastes metallic, smells acrid, and pushes me to the edge of my seat, my spine erect and shoulders frozen. From that position at the end of the bench, I decided to never play again.

Failure, even in its slightest form, has the power to completely derail my ambitions.

When I was 26, I submitted a woefully unedited essay to The New York Times’ Modern Love column. It was, of course, rejected. Reading that email stung so deeply, I could do nothing but crawl into bed. My husband left a dinner at my bedside that turned stale and cold. I could not eat. I could only cry, and fall asleep without my dreams of widespread readership and a subsequent book deal to comfort me any longer.

I woke up the next morning empty and puffy-eyed. Instead of writing about the experience, I avoided my laptop and notebooks. I buried myself in my job, in my newborn baby, in reading. I did not write again for over a year.

At that time, I had limited writing training. I had no writing community. And I had no publishing experience. I had no concept that getting a green light from Modern Love was, according to writer Andrea Jarrell, akin to winning American Idol.

I went in cold without warming up, and Simon Cowell rightfully put me in my place. But the Simon Cowells of the world don’t always have the last word, nor do notoriously intimidating high school volleyball coaches.

It took me years to push real and imagined criticisms from those kinds of voices out of my head and just play, just write. But even with those voices in my head, the other ones – the ones of characters I wanted to explore, of personal insights I knew could make great essays – were still in there fighting for space. Eventually, they won over, and I found myself again starting stories in the Notes app on my phone.

Soon after, I saw an ad for a creative nonfiction course with WOW Women on Writing on Twitter. I signed up as a birthday gift for myself. When the course instructor read my first draft, she wrote back, “You are an amazing writer! SUBMIT THIS. You should dream big!” It was the first time anyone had called me a writer. I was hooked.

It took only this little vote of support to get me back in the game. But this time, I was in it for me, not for the validation. I was in it just to write. And that had nothing to do with major publishing success. It’s been the same for me on the court, where I’m more thrilled to nail a spike with topspin than I am to impress my coach. My focus has shifted to my own development. It’s been freeing, and exciting.

That doesn’t mean I have an endless amount of time to offer writing, or volleyball, but the windows of opportunity are there, even in my thirties. They will exist, for the foreseeable future, in the small spaces carved out after attending to my job that pays the bills (kitchen and bath designer), and my job that feeds my soul (mom of four.) But the better I get at all of these things, the more present I am for all of them.

There will always be better writers out there, as there are better volleyball players. I play every week on a court tandem to players my own age whose spikes leave my mouth agape, in the same way pieces by writers like Claudia Monpere and Bethany Jarmul do. Will I ever make it into that neighboring volleyball league? Will I ever have a byline in a top magazine? Who knows. But the practice of both has brought a level of growth and fulfillment I never predicted. And one seems to inform the other. This is the second essay I’ve written about volleyball. While I play, I’m watching the ball, but I’m thinking about the characters I left on my laptop a few hours before.

In both worlds, too, I have found a sense of community. I’ve reconnected with old friends on the court, and met new ones both younger and older than I am. In literature, too, there have been (mostly digital) relationships that have only improved my work. Chelsey Clammer, a brilliant teacher and editor, helped me publish two of my essays. And Kaci Neves, my writing partner, holds me accountable to a schedule, and to a higher caliber of writing while I try to emulate her skill.

Failure continues to plague me. It lurks in the deserted stands of my Tuesday night games, grinning like a ravenous hyena hungry for my missed serves. It howls with excitement when I open my email and find a courteous journal rejection. But I no longer let it feed on my sorrow for long. I have no plans to put my volleyball or my pencil down.

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