I Thought I’d F**ked Up! – The Climb #966

Friday 15th October 2021

I thought I’d fucked up today.

Since the pandemic started I’ve really been trying to diversify my writing. I’ve tried a number of different mediums, and as is to be expected, more often than not things go wrong.

For me, especially as someone who likes to plan to the point of procrastination, being able to execute quickly and learn through mistakes is an important lesson. I don’t go in blind, I do my research, but there’s only so much you can learn before you have to learn by doing.

I’m OK with this. With each of these ventures, the goal isn’t to be good at them from the get go but to try and learn from the experience. The journey is more important than the destination, because for most of these mediums, they’re not my primary aim as a writer.

They’ve also been fun too. Being free from expectation on deadline or quality has allowed me to have fun and explore without worry of judgement.

This week, I’ve been working on a secret project. The timescales are incredibly tight, but that’s born of the medium rather than any poor planning on my part. I’ve enjoyed it because it’s needed me to write fast.

So I’ve thrown myself at it. I’ve found even at my fastest, I’m not fast enough so whilst this hasn’t been a week of a great number of words, it has seen me do a lot of editing. And as a result, I’m tired, don’t have time to think, and am forced into a position where I can’t wait and think but have to do.

The results… have been surprising. I’m questioning a lot about my wider writing, because of how well I’ve done writing fast. Something that was initially a fun exercise to see if I could, has become validation that I can.

But tonight…

Tonight, I thought I’d fucked up. I go to check some stats on something and it’s not what I think, and suddenly, that thing that my research said can happen, might have actually happened. It’s part of the medium, and something you have to accept.

Yet part of me felt like I’d failed.

I think if my initial experiment had been what I expected then maybe I wouldn’t have felt so deflated but I was left wondering if this was all a result of me working too fast.

I should have gone slower, I thought to myself. I should have got someone to double check it first.

I wanted to tell myself that this was learning, that this was about not allowing yourself to be derailed by minor setbacks. It was about picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, and enjoying the journey of fixing the problem

But I realised that whilst I’m pretty good with something like a writing rejection where I just take the day off and eat ice cream, I think it derails me more than I’d like to think it does.

My standard is always to take a day off and regroup. Come back at it fresh. But I think there’s part of me that loses a bit of interest when something goes wrong. I blame myself and because of that I question whether I’m up to the task. This is, of course, ridiculous. I KNOW that progress without failure isn’t really progress.

I’d been so proud of this little project. I was happy I’d taken on something so alien to me, did the research and then executed only to get results better than I could have imagined. And then it had all come falling down when I’d fucked up.

Except, I found out when I got home tonight – I’ve not fucked up. The analysis I was reading hadn’t properly updated and everything is fine. It’s only in that moment of relief that I realise how deflated I’ve been all night, hiding it from even myself because I know this is a journey and fuck ups are to be expected.

Perhaps I’ll make a fuck up next time. Or perhaps I’ll learn to be less derailed by them and instead accept them more as part of the journey. And by that, I mean really accept them, rather than just pretend I do.