How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?
I lived a privileged life. Star athlete. Smart. Full of dreams and ambition. I felt I could go down any career path I wanted and succeed; it looked like I had a bright future ahead of me. Until mental illness and addiction wreaked havoc on my life.
When Mental Illness Entered My Life
It started slow–started in my teens and its teeth sank deeper and deeper into my soul, injecting its venom into my veins over months and years. My performance in sports began slipping. I was now unable to fully lose myself in the moment. I now had anxiety whispering fears in my head all hours of the day that distracted me, delaying my response time just enough that I began to be not quite the star I once was on the field.
My school work mainly stayed up, but I was never able to excel the way I knew I could have. A panic disorder consumed my attention. I found myself constantly distracted in class, lost in the hell of my mind. But I was able to keep my grades up by teaching myself the lessons in the evenings.
But like a house build on the edge of a cliff, over time pieces of my life began eroding away and were swallowed by a sea below, never to be seen again. I was lost. I was depressed. My sense of self was lost. Who was I without this superficial identity that allowed me to feel accepted?
Adding Fuel To The Fire Of Failure
What I lost I couldn’t retrieve and what I had was slipping through my grasp. Joy had ceased from my life, so I turned to the one thing that made me feel like my old self. The self before the crippling panic attacks. The self before the depression and shame. The self that felt somewhat normal or at least could connect enough with others to have fun. I started using alcohol to treat the anxiety disorder that was ripping my life away from me.
And it worked. My God, did it work! I felt so much better. Fear was dead. For the first time in years the voices in my head were quiet enough that I could enjoy life without fearing the worst, without wondering what if?
Well, the therapeutic elixir was short-lived. What began as my salvation became my prison. Drinking was no longer fun; it was survival. Without it, the anxiety came back ten fold like mold growing in a locked closet. It was too much. It smothered me. Left me without breath and surrounded by death.
So I drank to kill that mold (or at least keep it contained behind that locked door). But then the withdrawals began. Then came anxiety produced by the one thing I’d found to relieve my suffering. My emancipator became my jailer.
My Four Causes of Failure
I didn’t wait for time to erode the foundation of that house I had on the cliff. I filled the ground with so much liquor that the earth gave way. My entire being fell into the sea of nothingness below, and I was drowning in my problems, forced under the water by my own hand. I had a big problem. Four actually.
A. I was addicted to alcohol.
B. Alcohol was causing major consequences in my life.
C. I was living with significant mental illness.
D. Alcohol was the one thing that worked to keep me relatively sane.
In order to get well I had to throw away my prescription. At this point in my life I wasn’t even legally allowed to drink yet. My life felt over. There was no part of my life that was a success. Everything was slathered with failure and pain. Deep, dark pain.
A Life Redeemed and Learning From Failure
By the grace of God, I got clean. I was able to get that monkey off my back but still lived with the monster of mental illness. And that monster was growing without my “medication”. Starting over was the only choice I had. I couldn’t rest on the person I once was. He was dead. Drowned in that sea, never able to be retrieved.
In recovery from mental illness and alcoholism I’ve had lots of successes. Plenty of failures too but not the kind I was having before. These failures I was learning and gleaning wisdom from. I’ve crawled out of hell and found a life of meaning despite the fact that I still struggle with mental illness.
Success and Failure Depends On How You Define Them
Success depends on the way you define it. I have no doubt that I would have been more successful in the eyes of the world had I never dealt with anxiety and alcoholism. But I would be less of a person. Judging my life strictly on monetary terms, I’m a huge failure.
How can I not be successful though when I’ve not drank a drop of alcohol in almost 20 years despite once being so addicted that I drank from the moment I woke up in the morning to the moment I passed out at night? How can I not see myself as successful when I have five amazing children and a wife who’s more than I could have ever dreamed of having? How can I not be successful when I can look myself in the face every day and be proud of the man I’ve become?
Oh, I have problems! Tons of those (lots of them still because of me), but they don’t consume me. Or even if they are causing major challenges in my life, I’m willing to challenge them right back and try to get back on the right path.
My Success Is Because Of My Past Failures
Failure has taught me everything I know. Failure is a key to success. When you have nothing, there’s nothing to hold onto anymore. Nothing to keep you back from seeing your naked self just as you are…a weak, messed up human being desperately in need of help and humility.
Each time I’ve failed I’ve gotten one foot closer to success. Because success isn’t about how well you measure up against the rest of society. It isn’t the amount of money in your bank account, the job you have, or the kind of car you drive. It’s how well you can face the person in the mirror.
Success is how well you’ve done with the potential within yourself. The potential for love, for honesty, for self-awareness, for growth, for forgiveness. Success is how well you’ve polished your soul and only failure and heartache can make you aware that it even needs cleaned.
My failures have become my greatest strengths. In them I’ve realized how fragile I am, how much I need grace, how much I need love. It’s my lowest points that have stretched me, remolded me into a person in progress but a person I’m no longer ashamed of.
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ALONG THE BARREN ROAD 
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