I feel like I failed at some things in my life, and sometimes I just didn’t try because I didn’t think I could be successful.

I saw this quote on a garage wall from Angela Rose Home:

What if I fall? Oh, but darling, what if you fly?

by Erin Hanson (a poet who wrote those words as a teenager)

Here’s the thing: I’ve failed enough that sometimes I feel more like this:

We don’t believe what’s on TV
Because it’s what we want to see
An’ what we want we know we can’t believe
We have all learned to kill our dreams

by Twenty One Pilots

I have literally learned to kill my dreams because I tried for things and it didn’t work out. I realized that some of my dreams were impossible and the world simply didn’t operate the way I wanted it to. I learned about my own deficiencies and sometimes my own unwillingness to sacrifice for success.

I see people with successful creative pursuits, but I also wonder if success operates like a pyramid scheme sometimes, with a lot of people at the bottom who are failing and struggling.

I don’t want to get involved in a pyramid scheme where I’m going to be sinking all my time and my hopes and my dreams into something that will never succeed.

But here’s the thing: I still write this blog. I thought about giving up a lot lately, because I go to many other websites and blogs and there are people there. My blog is not like that. I only get a few views here and there, and I’m mostly writing to my mom, my sister, and my husband. I don’t know if anyone else reads this.

I still write this blog. And maybe that’s what success is about: choosing to pursue something so worthwhile that it doesn’t really matter if you succeed or not; the very pursuit of that thing is good enough.