Friends keep messaging me through Facebook or other social media platforms telling me how ‘brave’ I am, how they are ‘inspired’ by me because we took on a massive ‘challenge’ by moving our family to Samoa.
I am none of these things. In fact, all I am is a collection of lost opportunities bound together in the coarse fabric of procrastination and lack of motivation. The tendrils of regret are stuck to me with the glue of fear. Hot, burning, oppressive fear, the fear of failure. So, I would like my children to know the truth, that they don’t have to be bound like me, oppressed by fear. They should take every challenge so that at the end of the day they will have succeeded where I have failed – by living. I have told myself for so many years, so long that I can’t even recall when it started that I was not good enough. This is now the bread and butter of my psyche, it is my default setting. So, when a new challenge arises in my life I use this as an excuse for why things don’t succeed, why I don’t get that job or why I find it difficult to write that story. In all honesty, it is not that I am not good enough it is because I didn’t even really try; because maybe I didn’t feel like I needed to. And then ... then I start to deconstruct my fear and see that my wants and needs to succeed come from such a privileged position that the only thing for me to do was fail, because there was no way I was going to reach that unobtainable goal. If I kept telling myself that I wasn’t good enough, then the failure was justified, and I could hobble on without truly making a difference. For me, my white privileged lens only allows me to see success in a narrow way. I want to achieve so much and because I have been raised with a construct of social normative practices that say to me ‘you are white, you are young, and you have the right to reach these goals’ that I didn’t even work for it – failure is the only true outcome of this. This is not an academic piece, that has been well researched using journal articles – this is me writing to my children letting them know that my biggest failure was allowing myself to be sucked in. Slowly, without even noticing it I came to believe that success was measured in terms defined by ones’ career, wealth, material possessions, academic achievements – isn’t it success that we have survived another day? Isn’t it good enough that we have made it to the end of the day and had food in our bellies, clean water to drink and a safe place to rest our heads? I am not brave, not in the slightest. Moving to Samoa was not brave it was necessary. It was necessary because I don’t want my children to reproduce my life. I don’t want them to unconsciously or consciously expect life to trundle along with the expectation that life with ‘just happen’. I want my children to feel the challenge in every cell in their body and take that challenge, even if it means falling flat on your arse and failing.
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