18,000 feet I failed. I do not believe it. My God, I, Michael Seto, failed. I gave up. I surrendered. I allowed the spectre of failure to defeat me. I turned around and headed back down the mountain, short of even the first peak, Stella Point, on Mount Kilimanjaro. My guide, Salim, tried to urge me on, but the decision stood finalized in my head. For the last two hours, each step required a herculean effort, straining just to place one foot in front of the other; barely maintaining my balance with trekking poles in each hand. I carried nothing except my recalcitrant body and a few candy bars, Salim relieved my of my light backpack an hour ago. My head ached from the 17,000 feet altitude, drunken with hypoxia (lack of oxygen to the brain), and laboring under a blanket of fatigue. At this point, I cared nothing for what my friends would say about turning back; I cared nothing for what I would think of myself for turning back. I could not even remember why I was here! What was I trying to prove? I thought of nothing in my reduced brain function; except laying down and sleeping, as capable and tempermental as an eight-year old child. Defeat hung around me like the early morning fog on the mountain. Humiliated, I did not want to face the cook and my porters, who cared for me for the last four days, just so I could make this attempt up the mountain. I slunk back into Barafu Base Camp, where our summit attempt started, hours ahead of the other climbers, who undoubtedly summited and were celebrating as I lay in my tent. Failure and I share a long relationship. One of me always running from it's insidious shadow, which drives us toward it's brother, success, in a desperate way, grasping for it like a life preserver. Forever just a step behind me, failure stood waiting to pounce at the first sign of indecision, or hesitation or God forbid, weakness. |
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I felt its cold embrace upon me not a few times in my life. Yet, I feel that I have never stood face-to-face with failure in a real meaningful way, where my whole life might crumble around me if failure won. No, things have always seem to come easy to me: grades, friends, success, money, and happiness. So when I did face potential failure, it was always with a smug self-confidence, the notion that I still held an ace-in-the-hole; that I would outsmart and outmaneuver its deadly grasp.
For my entire life, I managed to get by without pushing myself to the limit, even in the Marines and on Wall Street. I managed to surmount any challenge with my physical, mental, and spiritual reserves untapped.
Eighty-five percent effort seemed to be all required of me to succeed. So I only gave that much, never red-lining my capacity, never stress-testing the machinery, never looking into the abyss without a safety line around my waist. I have been cheating failure most of the time.
Fear of failure constituted one of my primary motivations in a lot of my life. The fear of looking incompetent, or stupid, or unathletic; which would reveal my true unworthiness as a person to the world. The Emperor wearing no clothes, the real Wizard of Oz exposed. People would see what a fraud I am.
This made me strive for success, not so much for the sake of success, but for the fear and loathing of failure.
Our society worships success. Winners stand venerated, losers excoriated. Pressure to succeed weighs on the mind of all men (women too, I'm sure, but I can only speak for men...well, maybe just me.) This got passed on from the "must slay the woolly mammoth and make fire" days and evolved to "must get gratifying job, buy house, have kids, satisfy partner emotionally, financially, sexually, spiritually etc." Otherwise you are offically a failure; and as such means being humiliated, ostracised, and castrated (symbolic).
As we get older, our failures get more spectacular and public (Mars Explorer, Challenger, Milli Vanilli); yet like protagonist Rob says in "High Fidelity" to his girlfriend, "if you really wanted to mess me up, you should have gotten to me EARLIER" (emphasis mine).
The failures that stand out most in my mind took place when I was young, when my naivete and sense of omnipotence was greatest: Third grade - sitting with Tanya (the blond girl scout), my friend, and being set upon by a bunch of the guys, who pinned me down and shoved grass in my mouth, while I writhed helplessly as she watched. Impotent.
Sixth grade - getting beaten in a singles tennis match at our club by Anita Colona, a girl, a year my junior. I thought I played tennis well. I was crushed. I cried all the way home. Pathetic.
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