Failure is the Greatest Teacher [PTSD Series: Part 6]

The Curse of Atreus [PTSD Series: Part 1]
A Girl Called Nameless [PTSD Series: Part 2]
The Symptoms of PTSD, and my symptoms [PTSD Series: Part 3]
Carry The Glowing Seed, Plant Reality from the Dream [PTSD Series: Part 4]
I Like Watching You Learn How to Be Alive [PTSD Series: Part 5]

1

I have put a pause on my PTSD series because honestly, I feel embarrassed.

I feel embarrassed because this last week I've failed in many of my guiding principles, have hit several low points, and been generally upset and cranky. I didn't feel qualified to write about PTSD recovery when I myself seemed to have become a failure.

But I never claimed to be perfect, and I have said that I am still in the act of recovery.

If anyone has watched the latest Star Wars movie, they too realize that "The greatest teacher, failure is." Failure indicates that we are trying. I would not be where I am today if I allowed myself to quit after I failed.

Failure is the greatest teacher because it illuminates the path we need to take by showing that the path we tried is not the correct one. It pinpoints the truth by showing us the consequences of doing what's incorrect.

So many of us are afraid to fail that we never start. In school we're rarely taught the value of failure, because if we fail a test, or our homework, we're rarely allowed to go back and fix it. The pressure is on that one point of failure or success, and not on the process itself. In an academic setting where our failure is not a life or death scenario, I think it'd make people more creative, successful, and experimental to be able to fail without fear of being punished for it. Instead we create people who have anxiety over failure, who believe it must be avoided at all cost.

I'm not immune to this fear. I've been telling myself that I'm going to submit queries to agents for my books for all of 2017 and kept holding off because the idea of failure, the idea of someone telling me that I wasn't good enough, terrified me. I pour years of work into my books. They are not just writings to me, but little slices of my soul, a piece of me. I know that I've had to write a lot of terrible books to get to where I am, and I will write many more books - so in the long run it doesn't matter whether these particular books are unsellable. My failures will help give me a guideline to how to write in the future. Except I've been so petrified by the idea of failing that until last week, I didn't even start.

I wrote these books years ago. That has been years in which I could've been emailing agents, pushing forward toward success.

Two weeks ago I added the task to my sprint to research agents and write my queries. Just last week I finished my queries and synopses, and today I researched agents I want to send to. And next week I will start sending them out.

Am I scared? Yes, absolutely.

But another lesson I've learned is that just because you're scared doesn't mean you can't move forward toward the thing that terrifies you.

Failing to try at all is the true failure, and not allowing yourself to move forward is the only way that things can never get any better. But just because I've failed does not mean that anything I've said isn't true, and it doesn't mean that all my progress is erased.

2

The truth of reality never changes, but our perception of how events changes how we view reality itself.

This is crucial to our happiness. I have found over the course of many years that although external events changed, I was usually stuck in a perpetually frozen state of unhappiness. PTSD is a mental illness that keeps you stuck in the past. It shrouds you in trauma that freezes the world so that you're always stuck at that point at which the trauma occurred. In a way your brain thinks it is keeping you safe. It keeps you in perpetual high alert so that if the danger were to happen again, you'd be ready for it. This doesn't just mean that you'll be waking up at nightmares, jumping at noises, or clutching a knife on the Subway, although those things are stressful and terrible.

It means that any point of happiness that arises you will do your level best to shred, freeze, burn, and strip it away because allowing yourself to feel happiness. After all, if you feel happiness, that means you might let yourself relax, to get off high-alert. And PTSD says that if you relax, the thing you're so frightened of will come slithering out of your blind spot and destroy you.

One way in which people keep themselves in this alert state is by focusing on the negative perception of the world, so that joy does not even have a chance to enter their hearts. But this erodes all happiness, and guarantees that you'll never recover.

In order to heal we must push through our discomfort and start changing our perception of the world.

Imagine two people that have the same exact job. They get the same exact amount of pay, and have the same exact tasks.

One person hates their job. The other loves it.

What is the difference? It is their perception of the job.

The person who loves their job may like being given a challenge, enjoys seeing customers happy, has budgeted their money so they have plenty to play around with and even save a little, likes having something to do during the way. They focus on what makes them happy - a look of satisfaction, the triumph from tackling a difficult problem, getting to hang out with a co-worker they like, finding a chance to breathe during breaks.

The person who hates their job may complain that it's too difficult, feel like it's not enough money for their particular instances, hate dealing with obnoxious and demanding people, wishes that they could just stay in bed and relax. They focus on the negative: A grumpy co-worker, or an error, or the pain in their neck, or how tired they are.

It isn't just choosing to focus on the negative or positive, it's reframing the world in the context in which you want to live in it.

This sounds so simple that it's almost condescending, but I promise that once you start focusing on things that make you happy, once you start reframing the world so that it is no longer your enemy, you will start to feel small spurts of joy, like flowers growing up through the cracks in concrete, like a slow growing green thing that begins to break the heavy mold that's grown over your heart.

3

Nobody ever talks about how frightening happiness can be.

For most people, they yearn for happiness and cannot imagine someone would actively destroy their chance at it.

But for people who have never experienced true happiness, it is a frightening and disorienting experience.

In happiness lies the unknown, and in unknown is terror.

In happiness you leave yourself vulnerable to the possibility of being destroyed.

But when you are unhappy, you destroy yourself every day. It's important to remember that. You are not saving yourself from pain, you are drinking little sips of it constantly.

If you go over the ridge, see the new dawn. If you take a breath you can feel the needles in your lungs, the excited squirming kick in your stomach. It's important to not discount just how terrifying this experience can be. It's like closing your eyes and falling backwards. It's like turning a corner and always finding yourself in an unfamiliar house.

It's like taking a drink and being unsure if it's water, or gasoline.

But I can promise you that it's worth it, to be terrified, because life cannot be truly experienced in its all intricacies and exquisite detail and opportunity when you are so unhappy that you've dulled all your edges and are trying to just get through the day.

It's difficult to explain this to people, because they haven't lived lives that have oscillated between numbing sadness and howling grief. They don't know what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night afraid to open their eyes. They don't know what it's like to flinch from a kind touch.

To them, happiness is normal.

But for some people, just allowing ourselves to be happy is one of the most difficult things we'll ever do.