The Failure That’s Always Haunted Me

I was fifteen years old and in love with Heath Ledger, so naturally I fell in love with the movie The Patriot, a film where Heath does heroic things, gets the girl, accentuates his strong jaw by chewing multiple apples (swoon), and then dies tragically.

I adored the movie’s theme song and wanted to learn how to play it on the piano. Unable to dispel the vision of myself, sitting at a baby grand while my fingers flew over the keys at my upcoming piano recital, I told my teacher I wanted to drop all other scales and exercises and just focus on learning the piece.

As an adult, I wonder my teacher didn’t caution me it was far too advanced. But I know myself, and she probably sensed iron will (and my romantic attachment to Heath every time I opened the sheet music), and couldn’t bring herself to tell me no.

The recital arrived.

I was not ready.

I was also nervous, playing on a strange piano, and on a stage with an audience.

(As I write this, I realize my piano teacher was not a very good teacher and left me very ill-prepared).

I approached the keys. The vision of my flying fingers, followed by a standing ovation, suddenly fled for cover, leaving me with nothing but my tattered sheet music and sweaty palms.

I murdered the piece—with all the passion of a fifteen-year-old and a broken heart. In the agony of knowing I wouldn’t be able to save the piece after I’d ruined it, I played on, giving up before I’d even finished. The final note was a jumble of something undiscernible and I fled the stage before anyone could give me pity-applause.

This failure always resurfaces when I’m on the verge of something new, when I’m about to do something that’s never been done before. An inner voice says, “look what happened the last time you took a big risk. It was a total disaster.”

My mind fixates on this failure, and, hard as I try, I can’t chase it away by pelting it with all the times risks have paid off.

This failure has no silver lining. So that must mean future failures will also have no silver lining.

I absolutely hate silver linings.

I never played that piece again, but it wasn’t the end of my piano career. That came several years later when I realized I liked the idea of playing piano, I just didn’t like the playing part. And that realization came after I got a new (better) piano teacher who actually made me work. She also didn’t let me play the stuff I wanted to play, which was the whole reason I took piano in the first place.

One potential moral to this story is: don’t have crappy piano teachers.

As I’ve taken some time to mull over why this particular failure always haunts me, I did discover one small glimmer of light: I’m not a thirty-five-year-old woman who wishes she’d learned to play the piano. I discovered I didn’t want play by actually playing. I still love piano music (Bach Piano is one of my top Spotify playlists). When I watch other people’s fingers fly across the keys, I know how much work it takes to be able to play that way. I’m grateful they put in the work, so I can enjoy listening while sipping a martini from a distance.

The memory of this piano failure haunted me a few years later when I wanted to write a novel and was afraid I wouldn’t finish. If I tried to do something that big, and it didn’t work out, I might discover I didn’t love writing, and while I wasn’t too sad when my piano career ended, I just couldn’t handle the loss of writing.

It was too personal. Too precious. I just wouldn’t survive if I didn’t have my stories.

That’s when a friend said, “If you don’t start the book, you won’t ever know if you could finish.”

Where my ability to pick piano teachers was wanting, I happened to have some wise friends.

So, when I was nineteen, I wrote my first manuscript. That was fun, so I wrote another one. Then another, and another. One of those manuscripts I tried to publish. It’s gotten rejected multiple times.  So, I started writing another one.

And I realize my fear of failure is just a bit silly, because when it comes to failure, I’ve definitely been there, done that.

A lot. That piano recital wasn’t my first and final failure.

And, you know, it’s not going to be the last.

While there are a lot of things to learn from failure, I’ve found the most valuable is: you don’t know you will survive failure until you fail—and then survive. No one else’s failure will teach you that, only your own.