You’re Not Failing. You’re Surviving.

I hear from a lot of people that they feel like they’re failing. Failing at work. Failing at home.

Failing with the big things is hard. Failing with the little things, like not having the energy to cook dinner or forgetting a meeting, that sometimes feels harder, they tell me.

You aren’t failing. Your brain is doing what it’s built to do: survive.

John Medina, author of one of my favorite books, a man who I will embarrass myself in front of if I ever meet him in person, wrote a book about our smart brains called Brain Rules. In the introduction, he lays out the foundation beneath each of the 12 rules he created: survival. Our brains were designed and have evolved to help us survive.

A quick story about my own smart, survival-focused brain. I have a chronic health condition called POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome). Something (a virus, my own immune system, genetics?) damaged the small fiber nerves in my body that regulate my autonomic nervous system. As such, my blood doesn’t circulate like it should. It tends to pool in my legs, so when I stand up after sitting or laying down, there’s not enough blood in my brain.

My brain, my smart, survival-focused brain, does something amazing to, you know, save my life. It orders the release of a flood of stress hormones that cause my heart to start beating faster. My racing heart increases the circulation of my blood, and voila! I’m back in business.

I’ve heard a neurologist say that for a person with POTS, each time we stand up it’s like riding a roller coaster. We’ll talk about why that’s not as fun as it may seem on another day.

My brain keeps me alive. The typical route to survival is blocked in my body, so my brain figured out an alternative. The alternative sucks. It really does. But if those stress hormones didn’t release, if my heart didn’t start racing, I’d faint (and I sometimes do), which is another not-so-great workaround for poor circulation.

When I see stars upon standing, which happens to me every time I stand up, it’s frustrating and uncomfortable. I wish it wasn’t happening. Reminding myself of what exactly is happening in my body as my heart begins to race, and that it’s my body’s way of keeping me safe, makes me feel a bit better. My brain is doing exactly what it was built to do: keeping me around to fight another day.

I want to invite the folks who feel like they’re failing, first of all, to feel whatever they need to feel and to talk about it in any way that they’d like. This is not about critiquing your experience of feeling like a failure.

For those who may benefit, I want to invite you into reframing your failure as survival. There is still a global pandemic raging outside. Millions are dead. Millions are living with illnesses and disabilities exacerbated by COVID. Millions are experiencing new disabilities through long COVID. Millions are loved ones and caregivers for those facing these challenges. Millions of children have lost their parents. Millions of educators, front-line workers, and healthcare providers are supporting us all through all of this.

You’re welcome to disagree, but what I see is an immense, collective trauma that is layered upon and mixed together with the traumas and inequities that existed before COVID.

COVID is not over, but even if it was, this trauma and its aftermath would still be impacting us in countless ways, because that’s what trauma does. Something really bad happens, and it stays with us. It persists. That is the nature of trauma, and our nervous systems adapt to survive its impacts, because that is simply what they were built to do.

You are not failing. The systems around you are failing.

Late-stage capitalism is in its death throes. It is biting, lashing out, and getting even meaner. It doesn’t care about your survival because it’s fighting for its own. It’s sole goal is to suck as much labor out of you as possible while it still can. When you want to take a nap or stare at the wall or play video games with your kids or vent on social media, when you forget a task or meeting, when you say “no” even though they want a “yes,” when you choose survival over productivity, it whispers in your ear that you’re failing because it wants to get you back in line.

But you’re not failing. You’re surviving.

You missed a meeting. You made a typo. You called someone by the wrong name. You “made” cereal for dinner. You didn’t write. You did write, and it’s not what you wanted. You screwed up the big stuff and the small stuff. You’re so very, very tired.

You didn’t fail. You survived. You are surviving. Keep up the good work.