When I was 12 years old, I stopped going to school for two years. I hated schools, their strict environments, the constant vigilance, the wafting scent of stale lunches at recess, the other students who never quite became my friends, the expectations that I could never fulfil, the meals I ate alone in the corner of the vast stadium. I was also very bad at mathematics. In one particular exam, I had a score of 12 out of 100 and still remember the dread I felt at night at the idea of having to tell my parents that I had failed an exam. Then I failed mathematics again. To cheer me up, my mother took me shopping after (which might have enabled my lifelong comfort at failing). In the course of this rather chaotic year, at some point, I point blank told my parents that it was impossible for me to go to school anymore.
After a few years, I also failed at being an academic success at university, where the head of the department rightly assessed me as being “very intelligent but very lazy”. I did better in my master’s degree but that was only because, by then, I was failing at other things: failing at being cool or having a clear purpose in life. I then failed to continue the job I had luckily gotten which then led me to fail at earning any money. I thought I could write for a living but I also failed at getting an agent or a publisher (and even an audience). Having given up on a literary career (like George Costanza, I am a great quitter), these days I am failing at far more profound things: moral clarity, politics, ethics, being a good person, etc.
If we trace the etymology of the word “failure”, it comes from Old French falir (11th c.; Modern French faillir), meaning “to be lacking, miss, fail; run out, come to an end; err, make a mistake; be near death; let someone down, disappoint.” This derives from Vulgar Latin fallire, itself from Latin fallere, “to trip, cause to fall,” and figuratively “to deceive, trick, cheat, elude; to be lacking or insufficient.” According to De Vaan, the deeper origin is a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to stumble.” Cognates include Sanskrit skhalate (“to stumble, fail”), Middle Persian škarwidan (“to stumble, stagger”), Greek sphallein (“to bring or throw down”) and sphallomai (“to fall”), and Armenian sxalem (“to stumble, fail”).
Maybe there are people in this world that never fall but I have been falling ever since I stood up. I also lack many (most?) qualities and if no corrections are made, in the words of my esteemed professor, “have a dark future ahead of me”.
I look forward to it, as I look forward to every night.
