AbsurdBeats

I’m slowly getting used to being a failure.

It was a little hard on the ego, at first, but after that first nip of recognition, things have been much easier.

I’m not being glum, or trying to elicit an ‘oh-you’re-not-a-failure’ response; I’m simply recognizing that by any of the standards I’ve set for myself, I haven’t done much.

I’m alive. That’s one point in my favor.

Didn’t use to be: To be alive was evidence of failure. I was supposed to be dead, and was not.

Now I’m all right with that. In fact, it’s downright fine that I’m not dead.

Okay, so now that I’m alive, I’m off charging up the professional ranks and blazing new theories and astonishing my colleagues with the discipline of my thought and the brilliance of my prose. Tenure? Hah! Why, I’ve already attained a full professorship! Students are scrambling to study with me; other universities are recruiting me. My articles are must-reads.

Oh, wait, no. That’s someone else entirely. I’m an adjunct professor at a CUNY college, with no job security beyond the semester.

What about the writing career? Two novels! Two more in the pipeline! Short stories! Plays! Pulitzers and Tonys and National Book. . . oh, sorry, that’s not me, either.

I live in a junior one-bedroom on the far side of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, with wine boxes serving as bookcases and drawers and end-tables, chairs covered with fabric remnants because I can’t afford to get them reupholstered, socks kept in milk crates, and Trader Joe’s beer in the fridge.

I’m forty-mumble-mumble years old and I live like a grad student. Only I have fewer prospects than a grad student, what with consciously turning away from any attempt at a tenure-track position and not caring quite enough about money to live otherwise and all.

And I’m all right with that. When I was in SmallTown I ran into a cousin I hadn’t seen in, oh, a decade, and each of us mentioned that our lives may not look like other people’s, but they work for us. We nodded at each other. I’m not rich, I mused, but I am free.

And I am. Not free of anxiety (especially not anxiety over—natch—money) or dissatisfaction or anger or any of the other nonsense that comes with a messy (i.e., human) life, but free of the sense that my life belongs to anyone other than me.

So by most American standards, I’m a failure; by my own standards, I’m a failure. But I’m also free to laugh about it, and let it go, and maybe, someday, not to think about success or failure.

It’s not so bad, this failure thing. Feels kind of like freedom, actually. Not bad at all.