Failure

I was cleaning out my desk and found a few pictures I had ripped out of magazines and saved. They were buried at the bottom. They've been in there for years, and I saved them as inspiration for something I want to achieve. Written on a post-it, I stuck to the pictures, were the words, "Don't quit!" 

I have hopes and dreams, but I also have a big fear of failing.

As a kid, I waited for dad to show up. He never came. I think that a lot of my fear of failing stems from the ultimate feeling of not being worth his time. I felt often like my existence itself was failure to him. I'm scared of being embarrassed and I was scared of embarrassing him. I'm scared of not being good enough. 

I don't know if you can relate, but when you have constant meet-cutes with not being enough, you learn to stop dreaming. You stop dreaming because you don't want to get hurt anymore, but at some point I have to let it go.

I know that what we become starts with our own choices. We need to let go of the past, work through it, and move on. Holding on to past hurt traps us in a cycle we don't want to be in. The saying, "forgive and forget," sets us free. 

Take my own mother, for example. She came from nothing. She ate out of the garbage can as a child so she wouldn't starve. She didn't hold on to the unfair cards life dealt her. Instead, she worked hard to overcome them, and be better. She left South America on a student visa and headed to the US to live the American dream. She attended college here and became an engineer.

What I've learned from her is to be a fighter. We can overcome our fears and our challenges, and maybe life won't look exactly how we dreamed it would, but God will give us exactly what we need.