Deep breaths & Failing forward

I'm celebrating a milestone I was so sure I wouldn't get halfway through and I'm starting this blogpost with a quote I've carried with me this one year of handling graduate school and work- Some of us have so much defeat in our past that we feel we lost the race before we knew it started- Beth Moore.Now I know I am not the only one with an almost paralyzingly anxiety about how things would turn out and, a fear that strong hardly ever pushes you to go ahead-and fail anyway, fail forward. This post is so important to me because I touch on a subject that draws out my weakness in bold fonts and calls me out to face them.I love to belong. I do not care what anyone has to say about standing out and feeling confident in their skin, however different. I like the feeling of having doors open for me and having arms at the other side, waiting. Rejection is hard for me. I do not take it too well. I do not take in deep breaths and try one more time. What I do is to coil and come up with a hundred reasons why I shouldn't have started in the first place.This year, I decided to submit a number of poems I've written for publication in journals. And my inbox has been a sad wave of "We're sorry to inform you..." and well- I got tired. It was (and still is) frustrating. I so badly want an editor to open up my file and have her face light up on the screen because of my poem, because of something beautiful I've written. I've been so worried sick about the rejection emails that I've come so close to wounding the heart of my craft, to questioning its essence, if any of it matters.These words by John C. Maxwell have been ringing in my head for days now-

If you're not failing, you're probably not really moving forward.

I'm not going to gift wrap the idea of failure and rejection; make it look like a glorious phase in our lives where we've got it all figured out.Failure is messy. It's the paint brush slipping from our hands and ruining the art on the canvas. It's the one flickering yellow light that makes us doubt our path. It is fear and anxiety and all the ways we beat ourselves up when things do not turn out as planned. But rejection is also fire. It lays the work bare and burns down every chaff. It pulls us back to the table and fights out the best in us.Labeling rejection as a lifelong epidemic keeps us stuck in the same place for so long in our lives. The idea of perfectionism is a trap and may we never spend the rest of our lives perceiving ourselves as failures when all we've been called to do is breathe, take one step after the other, and should we fall, give ourselves the grace to rise, dust the sand off and keep moving.This isn't a post telling you to not give up (or maybe it is). This has nothing to do with refusing to quit a race when it gets muddy (or maybe it is). But really, however the world makes it look like, i want to put it out here that it is absolutely okay to fail. Yes, I said what I said. It is fine and this is why- rejection isn't a finish line, it has never been the end of a journey. We've been made to believe failure is a destination; some place we arrive, put our bags down and get comfortable. Contrary to popular belief, we cannot make a home out of rejection. It makes no room for us to become and thrive.But growth is a beautiful thing and victory is sweet. I will not dare miss the risk of falling if it means I have to get back up and keep fighting. I am a hundred submissions away from being published but what's a hundred poems if it means I get to grow better as a writer, if it means I get to go back each time to my desk, pour out words upon words, find out what I may have missed in the last 99, and do it the best way I know how.Rise above rejection- it can only cripple you if you allow it to.Side note: If you're a creative and your submissions don't always make the cut, it may not always be you. So many times great artists have sent in brilliant works that weren't accepted simply because their works did not meet certain criteria that the journal was looking for. It helps if you send your works to journals that are looking for your style (or something close to it!)