I’m going to do my best to write this without over editing myself.

Every year for the past few years, instead of having a list of resolutions, I pick a word that embodies what I want to achieve for the year. This year, I thought long and hard about what I wanted to achieve, and the only word that came to mind was failure. I want to fail. I want to fail often, I want to fail quietly, and I want to fail publicly. I want to try and people to know it didn’t work out. I want to be a cautionary tale of what not to do. I want to try things and be corrected. I want things to go wrong because it means I tried. I want to try things again.

Striving for perfection is good. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to do things well and to do them excellently. That desire had been a healthy driving force for most of my life and I want it to be healthy again. *deep breath* If I am going to be better, I have to say things out loud that make me want to throw up. Because of a trauma I experienced, I took what was once a healthy driving force, and turned it into a toxic way to protect myself from further pain and to control the world around me.

I’m tired of letting it control my every waking moment. I’m tired of being afraid to make a mistake. I’m tired of making a simple error at work, or poor choice of words to a friend keeping me up all night, to the point where I make myself ill because I cannot simply just.. move on and try again.

So, in 2021, I want to be comfortable making mistakes. I want to be okay with people knowing I tried something and then it being a total disaster. I have been held hostage for so long by this fear and I don’t want to live the rest of my life this way.

Here’s to trying things, and failing and then trying again.