I’ve always been really bad at setting personal goals. Or maybe all goals? I suppose I do manage to set milestones and deadlines for my work. There are outside pressures making sure I get things done. My faults are only most obvious when it comes to the things I do for myself. Things I want to do, but don’t necessarily have to.
I want to write more. So I reopened my latest WordPress blog. I was inspired by a few personal websites coworkers had created and were creating, so I plopped down a nominal sum for this domain and some hosting. After migrating my posts a few days (or has it been weeks?) ago, I still hadn’t written anything new. At least, I was definitely nowhere near accomplishing the “writing every day” I was hoping for. Hell, the first post in my archive is me years ago promising that I’d start writing again, creating again. See where that’s gotten me.
I dropped by my parents’ house for Mother’s Day and left with my dad’s unused electric violin, telling myself I would relearn how to play. As of today, it remains unopened, sitting in the exact spot I had set it down the moment I’d gotten home, resting at the foot of my bed as a cute new obstacle for my cats. Before leaving, I had played a few notes on my own violin, just a few measures of a couple of songs I vaguely remembered. I’d forgotten just how loud it was. I mentally reprimanded myself for each barely audible squeak of my bow moving awkwardly over strings rough from years of disuse. Of course it’s normal not to sound practiced and perfect with a gap of nearly (or over?) nine years since the last time I’d played. Yet somehow it still felt like failure, still feels unacceptable to admit those noises were produced by me.
I want to draw more. I want to relearn calligraphy. I want to sing better. I want to practice coding. I want to build more websites. I want to create inspired designs. I want to take x, y, z courses online while they’re still free.
Self-improvement. Personal development. Clearly these are all great, positive pursuits. But to attempt to grow, to see progress innately implies imperfection. Why am I so afraid of not being perfect?
Growing up, I was one of those kids other kids hated because their parents would use me as some strange mythical standard they could compare their own children to. I’d pretend I didn’t overhear the few times bitter Chinese mothers couldn’t wait the extra thirty seconds before I’d definitely be out of earshot to scold their own perfectly fine and capable daughters. It didn’t help that my mom was so proud of me that she would sometimes share slightly inaccurate, just barely hyperbolic stories about my various feats. “Listen to what Kathy said to me yesterday. Isn’t she so mature and understanding?” As a respected teacher and mentor among her friends and our community, news spread relatively quickly, and her words had a certain weight to them.
“You’re so talented!” the moms would echo. “So smart! So creative!”
I could never tell if these stories were entirely true, but my mom would report back to me occasionally to let me know how everyone was so surprised I scored only a 4 on my AP English exam or that I was actually attending UCI. “Irvine? You mean LA? Berkeley?”
What a terrible thing for me to complain about. How minuscule an issue, what a non-problem problem.
My family was well enough off. My parents had paid their fair share of hardships: growing up in poverty, saving up to move to the United States and leaving their families behind, pushing through higher education in a foreign country, scrounging up coupons and slowly compounding their own humble fortune. My parents took me to and from school, extracurricular activities, after-school classes, accelerated learning. They paid for piano lessons, violin lessons, chess lessons, writing lessons, art lessons. They supported me wholeheartedly when I flirted with aspirations of becoming a writer, a game designer, an esports community leader. (What did that even mean to them, then? Nothing. Still they trusted me.)
How could I possibly take any of that for granted? How could I ever have self-esteem issues, having grown up in such an encouraging and loving environment?
Somehow, somewhere along the way, or perhaps already ingrained in my nature, I had failed to learn how to fail. I had learned to never accept failure as an option. Before I knew it, before I even realized any of this, I had fallen into a habit of never trying—because to never try was to never fail. If I wasn’t the best at something, it was because they had tried and I hadn’t. They had practiced that piano piece for a hundred hours, and I had practiced for ten. They had studied for the test all night, and I hadn’t bothered to open my textbook.
I still remember, many years ago, walking rigidly to my bedroom, closing the door quietly behind me, and crawling entirely underneath my blanket. I started sobbing, quietly at first, then loudly and in complete bewilderment. Why was I crying? I had just placed fourththe mortifying “honorable mention,” not truly a placement at all—at a regional piano competition. I had performed a piece that I was told, from the moment my teacher had selected it for me, was a perfect fit for me.
I remember I was seated at the front of the room on a small stage with four others, perched on a stool with my toes stretching to reach the wooden foot rail a bit too far for me. The question was about failure. How did we handle failing? How was failing a part of our learning process, a way we got to where we were, as successful entrepreneurs and experts in our field?
The prompt was clearly asked in a way for us to impart our wisdom and comfort around using failure as an stepping stone for growth and eventual success. I awkwardly listened to the other panelists as they gave their heartfelt stories of trial and error, sharing words of encouragement with our audience of undergraduates. I heard myself giving a similar answer, joking about how I didn’t used to take failure gracefully, but soon realized that it was a necessary part of my journey.
What a load of bullshit.
Even tonight, typing up what has already turned into a rambling mess about my personal hang-ups around accomplishment, the American dream, and Asian parental expectations, I’m still not convinced that I have learned how to properly accept failure. I’ve certainly gotten no better at accepting myself.