Failure Mandala

This usually happens to me. I am usually stuck in a rut of my thoughts, there are so many of them that they just create a mandala around me, and that is where I live most of the time. In the centre of that mandala, and honestly, I do not mind it so much because mandalas are pretty and they are apparently supposed to be soothing, or at least they distract you from your inner monologue by distracting your annoying voice. Here I am, stuck in this rut, trying to think what to write next. I talk to a lot of people who are surprisingly impressed by what I have done/achieved in my life at apparently ‘such a young age’. I find myself in an awkward predicament when I am asked how I did what I did or how I am doing what I am doing. I do not understand what people can see, that I can’t about me.

Anyway, coming back to my writing. This time I wanted to write something personal, not an opinion, but a personal account of some sort that would talk about something that I have been through. That might help someone who might be going through the same thing at a similar time and that might, if not help, then just ease their stress by telling them that they’re not the only jokers in the deck. But again, I was stuck, I did not know how to put a piece of my life out there without boasting about my so-called achievements.

As always, my solution came from a trusted source where all my solutions come out from – the movies. I saw Dear Zindagi and of course everyone will relate to it like a viral meme. It is our story, different stages, same devils. At some point in the movie, someone talks about achievements and how we think that the only things that we think that we deserve are the things that we think we have worked hard to achieve otherwise we think that it is just something that has come by. We value something more when we have cried and begged and pleaded and sacrificed something for. That brought me back to what I wanted to talk about.

I am human, so of course I have had a lot of failures in my life. Obviously, they have been catastrophically dismembering. I have had the feeling that every failure is something that I will never come out of, and as I did, I came out of it like all of us have at some point in their lives.

But here’s the thing, I don’t know what due should I give to my failures. Should I be thanking my failures, because without them I wouldn’t have succeeded and achieved what I have today? Or should I be mad at my failures. Mad why? Because today I live a scared life. I am scared to fail so I strive to achieve everything I can. I doubt myself every step of the way when something that I have achieved hasn’t taken the life out of me. More than failing I fear the perception that people would have of my failure. But today, THAT exact fear has helped bring back the focus in my life. Sometimes, I am so focussed that I forget I exist.

So, what do you do with your failure? Do you wear it as a chink in your armour or do you see it as the rusted nail in that armour? Are you angry at the failure or are you happy that it happened to you? Do you see it as a glass half full or half empty?

I don’t know if I have figured out the answer to that question yet, but let me tell you what I have figured out. Success is a lone man’s island, you with your achievements while people are clapping for you and are with you, in spirit. Success is when you know yourself well enough to know that you deserve what you have achieved. But failure is a crowded metropolitan. Everyone’s failing every day of the week, we are together in our inner turmoil. We are all treading lightly sacrificing a part of us to reach a whole. We are just stuck in our own separate mandalas.

While we are there, let’s colour it up, shall we?