Y’all, my life has been filled with firsts the last 3 years. First-time mom, business owner, mom of two, writer, social media manager. And I am one of those people who has had pretty much everything come easily to me (besides getting pregnant).
So when I tell you that I am not someone who sucks at things easily, I mean it. I’ve always had this attitude of “if it’s not easy, it’s not meant to be.” I honestly think it’s mostly because I really don’t like to be bad at things. And maybe it’s not being bad but this fear of putting in too much effort and then being a failure.
Enter infertility. I mean, how can you be bad at getting pregnant? Apparently, it’s pretty common which I never knew when I was going through it. 1 in 4 American couples has trouble getting and staying pregnant. That’s a mind-blowing number when you look at it.
Paul and I tried and tried to get the damn thing done naturally and I don’t really think it was because we were bad at sex. When we finally did get pregnant, I didn’t think about how much my life would change. And becoming a mom is life-changing in a way you don’t really contemplate when you’re stuck in an endless loop of trying to get there.
I wouldn’t say that I struggled with being a mom. I struggled with the changes in my life to adjust to being a mom. My world no longer revolved around me. It revolved around a tiny human that I was petrified to fuck up in some way.
On top of that, I was trying my hand at becoming a fertility coach. I’d never had any experience with biz ownership. I knew one successful biz owner who made it all look very easy so I figured it couldn’t be that hard.
Wrong.
It was really hard and because I was so scared of failing, I used everything I could to beat myself up. To the point that I had to throw in the towel for a couple of months.
During that break, I came to a realization that if I was going to start these new life-changing things, I should probably learn to be okay with sucking at them first. It was okay that I didn’t have it all figured out, that I was “failing.”
So here are a couple of ways to gracefully suck at things if you’re in the midst of failure.
1 – Give yourself some compassion
Look, there’s pretty much zero way we can be perfect at things right out of the gate. And trust me, what looks perfect on the outside probably took a number of perceived failures to get there. So take a deep breath and remember that there really isn’t any way to mess this life up. You aren’t failing, you aren’t terrible, and you can do this.
2 – Not everything is supposed to be easy
There are so many lessons to be learned through trying again and again. You learn resilience, grace, and how much strength is inside of you. As you struggle, you learn to lean on yourself and hopefully a core group of people to lift you back up when things get hard. And if you are never at the bottom, how would you ever understand how gratifying the top can be?
3 – Let it be fun
We have a choice, we can kick ourselves when we’re down, or we can look at our situation the way a child would. Would a 3-year-old look at their masterpiece, call it garbage, and throw it in the trash? Heck no. They’d proudly march it into their mom and show her with a gleeful smile on their face. When you feel like you’re masterpiece is not turning out the way you want, look at it through a child’s eyes. Let the fun, easy side come through your gaze.
4 – Learn to see beauty in perceived imperfections
Allow yourself to be redirected and go with the flow. Maybe that first draft of your book will turn into a masterpiece or maybe another story will blossom from it. You are meant to be exactly where you are or you wouldn’t be there. When you can take a step back and let where you are be perfect in its imperfections, you find that life can be a lot more manageable.
Failure isn’t easy, trust me, I understand it first hand. But when you look back over your life, you’ll most likely see that you are failing forward. You aren’t going to be stuck in this season of your life forever. And how beautiful is that?