Blog Post #39: Fail.

“Fall on your face.” That’s a quote from a movie I watched today, called The Last Word. I laughed out loud and almost cried watching it, I’d very much recommend watching it. 

No, don’t literally fall on your face. 

But if you want to achieve anything significant in this lifetime, you have to fail. You have to make mistakes. And not just once, but over, and over, and over again.

And yes, failure sucks. It hurts. I know. Last Thursday at 11 AM, I was playing the Notturno from Respighi’s Sei Pezzi (Six Pieces) in my piano lesson. I love the piece, it’s very dear to my heart, but for one reason or another, I wasn’t playing it the way I wanted. And clearly not the way my teacher wanted, because he stopped me not even halfway through. He asked me if everything was alright in my life, because I wasn’t playing at a level that a junior piano performance major should've been. He told me he felt frustrated and helpless, because lessons like this have been a recurring pattern this semester, and he didn’t know how to help me anymore.

I walked out the lesson wondering if I’m even built for a career in music. Aside from playing with a cellist in his rep class, I didn’t touch a piano for the rest of the day- it felt too raw, too painful. I let myself take some time away. I journaled, walked around campus. I talked to friends. 

At 9:15 that night, I found myself sitting at the piano in one of the recital halls in our school. My friend sat on a seat in the audience, listening. We’d agreed to perform for each other. So with baggage in my soul, I played my Respighi Notturno. Not perfectly. I missed a chord or two. I didn’t give the piece the overall shape I wanted, it should’ve gotten louder, and don’t even think about a climax point. But I played with my heart.

Something occurred to me that day. I play music, and not just play it, but made it my whole undergraduate major, because I love music. And as long as I continue to love music, I will try to make it work.

And yes, I will continue to fail. Play wrong notes, have memory slips, experience bad days that become a bad performance.

Failure makes us question our worth sometimes, and whether we’re worth the dreams planted in our heads.

If you want a completely failure-free lifetime, I invite you to sit in an empty room staring at a wall for the rest of your life. But if staring at a wall doesn’t sound like the life for you, I invite you to run towards failure. Grab it tight, and then let it go. Why? Why is some random young woman named Laura on the internet telling you to fail, on a blog that she doesn’t bother to edit before publishing?

Perhaps because I believe you deserve to achieve the dreams you want to achieve. There, I said it. 

Anyways, if you celebrate, it’s almost Thanksgiving, so Happy Thanksgiving and cheers to the failures we have made and will continue to make. Peace.