Hello.
I’ve recently been thinking a lot about failure.
For much of my younger days, I stuck to the things I knew I was good at: I hated failing because I hated the feeling of not being good enough.
I hated the feeling of not being good enough because, deep down, I believed I wasn’t actually good enough and I wouldn’t be deserving of love if I failed.
This all fuelled my imposter syndrome, easily summarised as: “they’ll find out I’m no good and they won’t love me anymore”.
This “they” was no-one and everyone: it attached itself to my parents, teachers, friends and even imagined communities or individuals that I deludedly placed my self-worth in.
It worked in conflict to what I knew to be my nature; emotional, sensitive, messy, curious and seeking deep and meaningful connections. This fear made me feel as thought I had to find masks to wear to ensure I’d be protected from people finding out the ‘truth’; masks that seemed more acceptable than my allegedly unloveable authentic self.
One of the funniest thing about masks is that only person you’re succeeding in hiding from is yourself, as most people can see right through the front.
SOOOOOO… failure huh.
Why is it good?
because…
IT’S VULNERABLE.
Aaaaagghhh!!
It’s so painfully vulnerable to sit with the feeling of failure. It can make us us feel weak and exposed, uncertain and confused, it can loop into our anxiety and feed off whatever demons we may be nursing.
But… failure can also be joyful.
And joy can only be experienced with vulnerability.
Let me try to explain why I think this:
I never knew failure could be joyful until I did acting classes in Brisbane as an adult in my 30s. Two of the most influential of them being improv & physical theatre. The first time I experienced celebrating my failures in an improv class I was like: WHO DIDN’T GIVE ME THIS MEMO GROWING UP? A LOT OF THINGS WOULD HAVE BEEN A WHOLE LOT EASIER. Yeah, I was glad but I was also mad -.-
In the acting classes I took (improv, physical theatre & voice), I saw that I could practice moving through vulnerability and failure in a low stakes environment. The classes weren’t attached to any of my intense migrant kid obsession of “getting ahead/catching up” or my childhood wound of “proving myself”. I also had no career goals around acting (which provides a very different headspace to someone who does).
I just wanted to learn how to show up, fail, be “burningly present” (shout out Lynne Bradley for etching that phrase into my brain), see and be seen, give and receive, explore what authenticity and vulnerability can feel like — and sometimes - succeed at doing some of it, or all of it.
When I got to Vienna, I was sad that I left all that behind in Brisbane. I had enjoyed it so much! The more I got to practice in the training room, the more I could bring those embodied experiences to my everyday life and I just wanted to keep going.
… but I was a wee bit prevented by the fact I was in a German-speaking country.
In my search for things to do in English, I stumbled across the International Improv Community Vienna (IICV) thanks to MeetUp. Honestly, that app has been a fantastic resource in every new city I’ve lived in. 10/10 recommend.
Doing improv with people from multiple cultures and languages has been wild. Though we all speak English - some of us native, some as a second/third/fourth etc language - we don’t necessarily share the same pop culture references, sense of humour, style of jokes, body language, or cultural tropes. Many folks have accents in English, which includes the array of English accents, so learning to attune your ear to each person’s way of talking becomes particularly important. On top of this, we also don’t necessarily share culturally socialised ways of expressing emotions or pop cultural references. This leaves a lot of content unusable, usually it’s the content you’d be able to lean on when you’re stuck — and that presents a challenge to push your creativity.
Sometimes, we have to work in FFP2 masks because #COVID. Voices and words are muffled, faces are obscured and I’m like “how am I supposed to do this when I can neither hear properly or read their face??” Then I remember that the body holds clues and my sense of awareness expands.
Over all, it’s a chaotic soup of intercultural communication and improv and I love it.
The thing that warms my heart the most is that everyone embraces the mess and goes with it. There’s no shame, there’s always a laugh and everyone is encouraged and supported.
To me, that’s the biggest pleasure of improv class: failure gets laughed about, discussed to see what we can learn, and then - apart from the lessons - quickly forgotten. It doesn’t define anyone or anything. It’s a moment, just like a good scene is a moment. The ephemerality of improv makes everything feel possible, while also being low-stakes. The low-stakes create the ideal playing ground for exploring what’s possible, it shapes the space of experimentation and learning.
If you struggle with a fear of failure, perfectionism or stagnation, head to an improv session. Not professionals, I mean a beginners class or an open class where people are there to learn. Get weird and silly. Experience a terrible scene in front of your classmates and then enjoy having your failure celebrated by a group of cheering people. Realise that you can always get up and try again. Witness that everyone is nervous and trying just like you. Remind yourself of what collective encouragement and support feel like.
I’ve been reflecting on this because I have recently been working on the curriculum of my own creative writing workshop series and the joy of failure is a key cornerstone to my pedagogy in teaching writing.
I’ve been part of a few writer’s workshops recently and I’ve seen that one of the biggest blocks to becoming a good writer is perfectionism. Confronting it isn’t always easy. For example, I still have the occasional improv classes where I leave unable to look people in the eye or say goodbye. That’s because the shame & fear attached to my fear of failure & vulnerability can be still be triggered. There important thing to note is that this feeling no longer destroys me; yeah, I have to deal with my anxiety but it doesn’t feel like an overwhelming threat that I need to protect myself from anymore. The trigger feels manageable, even if it makes me temporarily socially awkward.
I think it’s important to remember this: accept that triggers may never go away, so what we’re working toward is making the triggers manageable. For me, that’s been by confronting them safely and learning how move through them, and more importantly - that I can move through them. That way, it’ll longer threaten you & shut you down, and you can stay open, curious and learning.
Another cornerstone of my pedagogy is a commitment to interdisciplinary learning.
It might sound odd but improv has taught me a lot about creative writing. Firstly, it has offered me an embodied way to understand scene building, dialogue and character development. Acting is story-telling through the body; for me, it has been a kinetic way to learn creative writing.
Improv has also gifted me with intellectual and emotional prompts to reflect on, particularly when I think about my creative process from first draft to published book. This includes the theme of this newsletter: which, has been the role of failure in my life. I believe we are our art and our art is us because the growth of both is intertwined. Learning to move through failure personally allowed me to move through it creatively.
Moving through the fear of failure also permitted me to let go of my own perfectionism and unearth my authentic voice. It helped me to feel confident in my subjectivity and to ask for help when I don’t know.
In other words, it has allowed me to accept that I know what I know and I don’t know what I don’t know and I cannot research my way into being impenetrable to criticism (which also relates to perfectionism’s cousin, the know-it-all curse). This fed into deepening my self-love and self-worth because I finally sought my own acceptance, rather than that of others.
Most of all, it adjusted my definition of success: I’d rather fail because I tried than succeed through a lie.
I’m super excited to share more about the workshop in the upcoming months :)
Until then,
Lamisse xx
The Joy of Failure
Yesterday I was going through my Instagram messages that end up in the spam folder and I saw messages people had shared when chadar was going to become an organisation. I cried reading them thinking I had failed myself and them. So thank you for this newsletter has brought forth a different perspective to my doom.