THE FORCE OF SUCH BEAUTY by Barbara Bourland - Good Housekeeping 'I Couldn’t Handle Failure. So I Decided to Embrace Losing'

Good Housekeeping | June 27, 2022

During the publication of my first two novels, I believed I was old enough, and had done enough therapy to understand what it meant to submit yourself for a performance review in public. Naturally, I was wrong: instead of responding with grace, I observed, with horror, as my standard for regular, go-about-your-day-self-worth became "ecstatic praise from others." Anything less was a catastrophe, one that left me feeling trapped in the double-bind of resenting myself for failing and for feeling like a failure, too. When your minimum for “OK” becomes “be the best,” it’s impossible to have a healthy relationship to anything, or anyone. Most of all, I felt like I'd lost my sense of joy. And I wanted it back.

I initially tried to manage this with the obvious: talk therapy. CBT. CBD. Meditation. Running. Drinking. Not drinking. All of these things worked until they didn’t; they were fine Band-Aids, until they fell off. The deeper problem — that my sense of self was fused to my ambitions — couldn’t be solved by breathing exercises, so I did the only other thing I know how to do: I wrote about it.

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