On Failure As A Path To Freedom

Hey y’all!

Happy Spring Equinox and Happy Aries Sznnn! I don’t know about you but the increased sunlight is already doing a world of good for my little spring baby heart. How’s spring treating you so far?

One of the key shifts that I made early on in my spiritual journey was seeing Spring Equinox as the New Year rather than January 1st. Here are three key reasons why:

1. The first reason is because it intuitively just makes more sense when you think about the shift in seasons in the Northern Hemisphere from Winter to Spring and notice what nature is doing at that time. Winter is a time for slowing down, hibernating, and reflecting while Spring is a time of speeding up, blossoming, and being reenergized. The only reason we celebrate New Year’s on January 1st is because of the shift to the Gregorian calendar which was made in the 1750s.

2. The second reason is because the Spring Equinox also coincides with the beginning of the astrological calendar. The Sun moves through each of the 12 signs in the zodiac every year in the same order. Pisces is the last sign of the zodiac and Aries is the first so the transition from Pisces to Aries season in astrology is the transition from one yearly cycle to another.

3. The last reason I shifted towards seeing this point of time as the New Year is because March 26 is my birthday. I’m a big fan of seeing your birthday as your own personal New Year and as a Pisces Rising and Aries Sun, my energy naturally aligns with the Equinox so why fight it?

Anyway, as I noodled on what I wanted to write about this month, I had a harder time connecting the different themes that have been floating about in the collective and in my own life. From continuing to learn about the Palestinian liberation movement and being reminded about how deeply interconnected our struggles for collective liberation are to struggling with my own experience with perfectionism and burnout, there didn’t really seem to be much connective tissue to explore.

But then a few days ago, it hit me. I’m about to turn 28 and for all intents and purposes, I’m failing. I lost my job, I’m drowning in student loan debt, I’m barely making my assignments for class, I have one close friend near me, I have no clients for my business, and I’m nowhere near getting married or having kids. By all measures of the American Dream, I’m failing. And that is a great thing.

Why? Because the American Dream is a scam. Accomplishing it requires that I abandon myself. It requires that I ignore my body’s wisdom when it’s telling it’s exhausted and on the edge of burnout. It requires dimming my light and making myself smaller to make people feel less threatened by me. It requires running myself ragged trying to “perfectly” keep up with male centric 24 hour cycle when mine is 28 days. And for what? The illusion of success when my day to day life is miserable? Nah I’m good.

As Mia Birdsong shares in her book, How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community, “The people winning at the American Dream are some disconnected, unsatisfied, lonely people. The American Dream’s narrowly defined paths to happiness and success rely on an acceptance of prescribed roles, and a lot of accumulation and exhibition…The American Dream remains defined by whiteness and masculinity, no matter who occupies the role…”

Failing against white supremacist, patriarchal, colonialist standards is actually one of the best indicators that I am free and living my life authentically. Because the reality is a system built on the intentional erasure and violent oppression of people that look like me could never provide me with any measure of success and validation that does not come with an incredibly high cost. So I’m actually glad I’m failing.

As someone who has struggled with perfectionism, people pleasing, and gifted child syndrome my whole life, that’s probably one of the most radical things that I could say. However, I’m able to say that because I realize that the root of those challenges comes from a society that has constantly told me that I’m not enough as I am.

Now I did mention there being some connective tissue between my experience and what’s happening in the collective so I will say that part of what helped me connect the dots between what I was experiencing in terms of feeling burnt out and witnessing what’s happening collectively is noticing what “failure” looks like to white supremacy in terms of advocating for liberation.

In recent weeks, protestors in the Bay Area have shut down the 101 highway and SFO airport to disrupt business as usual. As I learned more about the protests, I started noticing comments essentially saying “that’s not the right way to protest” or there’s a better “time and place.” This is a narrative I noticed during the Black Lives Matter protests and I realized that if protestors are receiving that feedback, they’re doing something right. A system that insists on you being complicit in your harm or the harm of others, will never support you protesting them in earnest. If protesting beyond the confines of what is “acceptable” is a failure, then accepting “failure” as part of the path to liberation is true for the collective liberation movement as well. The minute we fail against the standards that are meant to keep us stuck and powerless, we’ve moved past the illusion of freedom towards actually being free.

All in all, the past few weeks have reminded me that white supremacy, patriarchy, and imperialism do not have the answers. If they did, the world would not be boiling, houselessness wouldn’t be rising, our mental health wouldn’t be deteriorating, and we wouldn’t be witnessing multiple genocides and global conflicts at the same time. It’s time for us to dream up a new world and find our own answers. So instead of continuing to beat ourselves up about how we’re not doing enough, how about we fail and find out? Find out what true success and fulfillment can look like beyond capitalism and white supremacy.

Thanks for reading and I’ll talk to you soon ❤️ 

With love,
Paula

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