If you could never fail

This blog post asked an interesting question: what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?

The post is geared towards more global thinking, asking what positive impacts you could have on the world, however, I think this question can be asked on a much smaller scale.

For many people, the word "failure" has many connotations. Everything from shame to unworthiness to self doubt to self-defeatism. It's amazing how powerful the word really is. Most times, failure is in relation to achievement, but it can be be viewed in other dimensions of our life such as spirituality or community.

People with eating disorders equate failing in a variety of ways. It can be everything from food to exercise to academics. It can also be seen in their eating disorder like statements such as "I'm a failure at being anorexic" or "I'm a failure at recovery." All this as we know as black and white thinking.

Aside from all this, I think there is a deeper meaning to the word failure--that it reminds us of our fallability, our imperfections, our unworthiness. It allows us to stop dreaming big. I know I may not be speaking for everyone here as there are quite a few eating disorder individuals who do go on to have great success in some area of their life, but I also think there is a proportion of us (maybe I'm only speaking for myself here?) who stop believing too. Not only in their dreams, but in themselves. They become so afraid to unharness their full potential, because the risk of failure feels too cumbersome. This only causes a continuance in rumination, "a spiral of morbid self-involvement that's extremely difficult to shake." (from "Weathering the storm" in Psychology Today)

So what would happen if we could never fail? Certainly, there are positives and negatives to this as we can learn from our mistakes. However, the possibilities could be endless too.

I guess this post reminds me of part of what I've lost through the ED--the ability to dream BIG. I don't know when I lost that ability--the fearless drive to be able to succeed at anything. I've always hated admitting it in the form of fear of failure (and success too), but rather telling myself and others that I learned to be realistic, that the world didn't always work out the way I wanted.

Perhaps, it isn't about never failing or feeling like a failure. Maybe it's more about learning to "fail better" as Samuel Beckett says in "Weathering the storm" He says: "it's a matter of controlling our motions, adjusting our thinking, and recalibrating our beliefs about ourselves and what we can do in this world."