Yesterday I felt a failure. The feeling is unpleasant, heavy and upsetting. It brought tears and held me immobile and helpless for a while. 

I don’t often feel a failure. I realise that I put significant energies into avoiding the feeling. I like to assess, to plan, and then, as things get underway, I try to review and revise. I am prepared to adjust expectations, alter my direction, accommodate changing situations and adapt my intentions accordingly. I do everything on the way, as it were, to protect the possibility of a sense of achievement at the end. 

It occurred to me that I can face defeat. Not easily, but more easily than I can countenance failure.

Defeat, while unpleasant, frustrating and disappointing, has grand, dynamic meanings. Etymologically it means to undo (Latin de-facere) and to destroy. Defeat is belligerent. To be defeated one has, at least, put up a fight. And this is the key for me: if I have tried my best, then there can be honour in defeat.  There is none in failure. 

Failure means both being unsuccessful and also ceasing to function, ceasing to exist, coming to an end. We may speak of someone ‘failing’ and mean that they are dying, a sense which conjures the death-bed vigil and is perhaps becoming archaic. Fail comes from the Old French falir: “be lacking, miss, not succeed; run out, come to an end; err, make a mistake; be dying; let down, disappoint“. A litany of despondency – from despondere, to give up hope and lose heart.

In Macbeth, Lady Macbeth urges her husband to commit the murder of Duncan. He asks “If we should fail?” and she replies “We fail. But screw your courage to the sticking place And we’ll not fail.”

It’s a famous quotation and I have always understood her lines to mean that, if Macbeth can only be brave and resolute, then they will be successful.  This matches Macbeth’s thoughts, who just wants to know if their plan will work (“if the assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch.. success“ my emphasis) without inciting further rebellion. The play’s action suggests she is wrong: he becomes King for a short time, but then Macbeth is bested by the English army and by the trickster witches. Fighting to the end, he is slain in individual combat.

But perhaps there is another reading.  To be fair, neither Lady Macbeth nor Macbeth stand up well as role models. It’s merely that the lines echo in my mind and I have only now realised that Shakespeare may not be giving us simple binary options. She is urging him to move forward with courage and determination. This still does not, cannot guarantee success; it is, however, a means to avoid failure. Macbeth is defeated. It is, arguably, Lady Macbeth who experiences failure. After the murder, she is progressively rendered helpless and agencyless, loses all peace of mind and dies by suicide.

To fail is also – etymologically – to fall, fallere (Latin) “to trip, cause to fall” and the Fall is, of course, Mankind’s original sin. ‘Fall’ seems almost always to have borne a metaphorical sense, to be lacking or defective, alongside its physical sense of stumble. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3v23).  It is I who stumble and fall, bested by no-one but myself. So failure is inherent: I fall because I am faulty, inadequate, I am simply not good enough.

In addition, fallere includes a sense of ‘deceive’. And this is the heart of it – in failure I feel cheated and deceived about myself. I described myself at the start as a person who likes to plan, review and revise and on this day I was complacent. I didn’t stay true to myself or use the strengths I have. My disappointment comes in cliches: I dropped the ball, I coasted, I let myself down. The only energy I feel in failure is the entirely negative one of frustration. Like failure, frustration also has entwined tendrils of meaning: disappointment and deception, error and harm, a subterranean link to fraud.

We talk of ‘admitting’ both failure and defeat. If success is impossible, then I have to let in one or the other.  Failure is stagnant, debilitating, it makes me feel tawdry. The frustration of failure is self-destructive: it’s giving up on myself and I am not prepared to do that. To push failure away, I must create other choices for myself. As honestly as I can, as bravely as I can.  It sounds almost simple. 

Locate my boot straps and pick myself up.