My Life as a Failure

I have been contemplating for a while to get back to writing in some form. I have written professionally before, as a screenwriter, a marketing writer, a technical writer, only writing about yourself is different. In the midst of all that contemplation, this piece spawned up from a reading response for a design methods course that I am currently taking at school. Having found my ground after falling many, many times in life, I thought it was only fitting if my return to writing was through an article about my failures.

Growing up in an Indian family obsessed with good grades can be a nightmarish situation for many kids, I am sure several of my Indian friends would be able to relate. Indian parents are obsessed with phrases like “Log kya kahenge” (“What will people say?”) and “Sharmaji ke bete ko dekha?” which roughly translates to, “Look at the neighbor’s son, see how much better he is doing.” My parents were no different. I never tasted failure throughout my life until I reached high school. I always secured the best grades somehow until then. But then in high school, something happened, and I ended up ranking fifth in the cohort. My parents couldn’t take that failure, as for them it was a matter of pride, that my friends had scored more than I did for the first time. Personally, I had no issues accepting my grades, right until the point I realized that my parents were ashamed of me. My failure was not about getting the best grades, it was about disappointing my parents. I was 15, and my long, arduous journey with failure had just begun.

My parents’ behavior for the next couple years reminded me that I was worth lesser than I thought I was. I started to devalue myself, I started setting the bar lower for myself. I finished high school with an above average score and went into university, having been able to secure the kind of major everyone (including myself) thought I should be getting into because it was the “hot” thing. I started my journey in what was considered an above-average university in my country studying Computer Science & Engineering. After the first semester, I failed 4 out of the 6 courses I was enrolled in. For the first time, I had actually failed. I made a mistake, I thought, but of all the people I had known at the time, only one other person had failed as many courses as I had. This isn’t just a mistake, I remember thinking, this is a crime, and I have truly failed. My parents were beyond disappointed. They were furious. They wouldn’t talk to me for days. I was ashamed, not being able to keep up with my friends and peers. I had to recover from that, and somehow, six months later, I did. But another six months into university, I failed again, failing in half the courses I was enrolled in. If you had thought my parents were disappointed before, this time they were showing signs of giving up. Their behavior towards me changed drastically. Now it was more like, they had accepted that I was no good. Almost every day, I would hear the tale of how much better some other guy or girl was doing in their life. I was compared with literally anyone they would hear from, that guy who went abroad after becoming a bartender, that woman’s son who went into the navy, that girl who would soon become a doctor in “alternative” medicine, they were all doing great and suddenly I was lesser than all of them. I started feeling like the biggest failure of them all.

There is something about my family (or any other middle-class Indian family like mine) that one should know about. The kind of behavior my parents exhibited during my teenage years is not because they were very competitive people who had achieved great things in their own lives. It is because they hadn’t been able to do that, and they thought that the only way to come out of it is if you be the best in everything you do and struggle hard to achieve it. Get the best scores in entrances, get into the best college, take the best major of engineering, start working at the best company, for them this was the only path to success. My family was going through the worst financial crisis of our lives and it reflected on how they were behaving with me. As Carol Zou suggests in this article, failure was really not an option for them.

For me, I kept “accepting my fate” that I was never going to be as successful as a tech professional as my peers and kept blaming it on external circumstances. I don’t have the money to do a Masters from a good university, I suck at programming, the list went on. Throughout the four years of college, I kept changing my parameters of success continuing to devalue myself and towards the end of my senior year in college, I was at rock bottom. I went into clinical depression, a period of my life I have only recently been able to open up about (after more than five years since it happened). But during my four years in college, I also discovered something I was good at. I was good at telling stories. I thought I was really good at that. It was the only thing I was not failing at, at that time. I had made up my mind, I will have to do something about it when I graduated.

I recovered from my depression at the same time as I graduated from college as if both were correlated (and they were). I did not do it alone, I had some help, of course. Coming out of college, I was convinced I wanted to give myself a clean slate, what could go wrong? I thought. I may not spend the next few years making as much money as my friends, I will probably have to struggle for the next few years until I saw any amount of success. I was willing to accept that as a trade-off against being able to express myself through my work. Because after being suppressed for the past several years in parental and peer pressure, I was ready to make mistakes that I could call my own. I would have no one to blame for my impending failure and hence I would be able to own it up with responsibility. After those years of naive failures, I was now, still naive, but making a decision that would forever change my life.

With a fresh mind, I somehow convinced my parents that I wanted to pursue a career in screenwriting and that was the only way I knew I was going to be successful in my life. “How do you know you’re not going to fail?” my mother asked. Honestly, I didn’t know if I was going to be successful. But I wanted to allow myself to fail this time and not be too harsh to myself if I did. In the next two years, I broke into “Bollywood” and worked as a professional screenwriter in the Hindi Film and TV industry and achieved a steep amount of success in a short time. I wrote for several TV shows that ran on major Indian networks, I wrote a short film that traveled around the world in different film festivals, I also was in the middle of writing a couple features. This does not mean I did not fail in my journey as a screenwriter, I failed a lot, but now I wasn’t as afraid of failing as I was before. Because I knew, if I had to succeed in life, I had to make my job, my calling. Alas, what I sought to find in my writing career, the kind of satisfaction I yearned for, I never found it. Another failure.

I left the entertainment industry and I was back to square one with respect to “finding” my calling. I drifted for a while, unsure of what I wanted to do, or what was best for me. As a teenager, I would never be able to do that. By age 25, I had spent two years in the film industry, gotten credited work that would forever stay on my portfolio, and I had decided to leave that life for something else, something relatively unknown to me. At that point, I may have felt a bit directionless, but I did not feel lost. I was ready to take new risks, and I was ready to work hard to make my work — my life.

You might wonder how my relationship with my parents had changed as I decided to jump ship once again. It had never been better. At some point between battling from depression and having the guts to change my field of work twice, my parents started truly believing in me and they have since been my strongest pillars of support. I know that if I fail today, they will still support me morally and emotionally, even if they can’t support me financially anymore.

Today — two years since I decided to take another leap of faith, I am pretty confident that I have found my calling in the field of User Experience. I aim to make a difference in the world using design thinking, and some of my projects are reflective of my belief. I would never be able to do what I do now, had I never failed as many times as I did, and if I hadn’t taught myself to come back up each time I fell down.

I grew up looking up to J.K.Rowling as one of my idols and her speech at Harvard about failure really moved me in different ways over time. She talks about what advice she would give to her 21-year-old self if she could use a time turner. Today, even though I am not nearly as successful as her, but as an individual who is far more confident to fail and learn from my failures than my younger self, the only advice I would give my 18-year-old self would be to not be afraid of failures. I would go back in time and tell my parents to be more accommodating of failure for the sake of their happiness and my younger self’s mental well being. I’d tell all three of them that failure is an event and not a person. Because if I hadn’t failed as many times as I did, I wouldn’t be the person I am today, and I am quite proud of what I have become.