Failure is like gaining EXP

I’ve been fucking up a lot lately. Well, that’s an overstatement but I’ve been thinking a lot about failure and how I’ve been handling it these past few days and I realized I haven’t been so gracious about it. Ironic, because the last blogpost I published talked about accepting slip-ups and doing better tomorrow. Maybe that was just me talking to myself, giving myself reassurances that I know I believe in but have found it harder to put into practice for some reason.

I admit, I sometimes have trouble following my own advice which technically makes me a hypocrite but I’d like to be able to say it, as painful as it is. To say that I can mess up sometimes and that I’m still human. And that it’s highly likely I’ll be superhuman and make these mistakes again despite, ideally, having learnt my lesson.

It was my sister who said to me the phrase “Failing is like gaining EXP”, where she refers to video game experience for those of you who don’t know. She was asking me about how I mustered up the courage to speak or present in front of a crowd, and I replied by saying “Well, the more often you do it and the more often you’re embarrassed in front of a hundred people, you start thinking ‘this isn’t so bad’“, which just horrified her more, by the way, but at least she gave me a pretty good metaphor for this blog post.

Making mistakes in life is a lot like slaying monsters in video games where you gain EXP (experience) in return. The monsters that I’ve been fighting recently have felt bigger though, despite how trivial they seem to be, and sometimes I can’t help but let them consume me from time to time. But to think about it in a brighter light, at least when I beat these boss monsters, I think I’d have earned enough EXP to have leveled up or at least earned an ability point so I can increase my WIS (wisdom).

So again, a reminder to cut myself some slack and a promise to try to be gentler to myself and hopefully become better along the way.