Finding Freedom in Failure’s Embrace

“Let me tell you about the year I unraveled. It was 2017. The kind of cold that lives in your bones. I’d built a life like a house of cards, shiny promotions, dutiful nods, a LinkedIn profile polished to a high gleam. Then, in one gust, it collapsed. A project failed. A trust fractured. A door slammed with finality. I sat in the rubble, picking shards of my ego from the carpet, and laughed. Not the laughter of joy, but the kind that comes when you finally see the punchline of a joke you’ve been living. So this is failure, I thought. Not a monster, but a mirror. Here’s what the mirror showed: I’d spent years sprinting from failure’s shadow, only to realize I was fleeing my own silhouette. My fear wasn’t of stumbling, it was of soaring. Because success demands a tax. It asks you to trade pieces of your soul for standing ovations. To become a statue on a pedestal, frozen in the pose of someone else’s admiration…”