Failure In Progress: Story 49

I thought I was failing at life. Then I realised I had never questioned the life I was trying to succeed at.

 

When Trying Harder Was Always the Answer

For a long time, I thought my problem was that I wasn’t trying hard enough.

I could see what successful people seemed able to do. Hold down a job. Build a career. Start a business. Keep up with life admin. Stay organised. Be resilient. Be productive. Have ideas and actually turn them into something.

So whenever I struggled, the answer seemed obvious: try harder.

Be more disciplined.

Get better systems.

Push through.

Learn another technique.

Become more consistent.

And for a while, I could do that. I became very good at forcing myself through things.

What I didn’t understand was how much of that effort was going into performing a version of life that didn’t really fit me.

I was late to understanding that I’m AuDHD. By the time I had language for things like masking, sensory overload, executive dysfunction and state-dependent capacity, I already had decades of practice at ignoring what my body and brain were telling me.

 

I had learned to treat difficulty as something to overcome rather than information to listen to.

If work exhausted me, I pushed harder.

If I struggled socially, I adjusted the mask.

If I couldn’t sustain a routine, I assumed I needed a better routine.

If I had an idea for a business but couldn’t carry every part of building it, I saw that as another personal failure.

“Eventually, my nervous system stopped negotiating with me.”

I had a breakdown.

And one of the strangest things about recovery has been realising that the old answer – push harder – is no longer available to me in the same way.

My body notices first now.

It objects.

It slows me down.

Sometimes quite brutally.

At first, that felt like another failure.

I wasn’t getting back to being the person I used to be.

But gradually I started asking a different question:

“What if getting back to that person isn’t the goal?”

 

Questioning My Definition Of Success

What if the life I was trying so hard to succeed at was built around definitions of success I had never actually examined?

That question has started reaching into almost everything.

What does it mean to be successful?

What does it mean to be a man?

What counts as useful work?

What does independence really mean?

How much money is enough?

What if needing help doesn’t mean I’m incapable?

What if being sensitive isn’t something I need to hide?

What if having a good idea doesn’t mean I should also be able to build the systems, market it, administer it, sell it and deliver it all by myself?

That last one has been particularly uncomfortable.

I have ideas. Lots of them.

I’m good at noticing patterns, asking questions, making complicated things easier to understand and helping people see things from a different angle.

 

But I’ve also repeatedly struggled with the machinery required to turn ideas into sustainable businesses.

For a long time, I compared myself with the celebrated neurodivergent founder story – the brilliant entrepreneur whose difference becomes their superpower and whose intensity somehow turns into success.

I didn’t feel like that person.

I felt like someone with ideas and ability who still couldn’t reliably carry the whole thing.

It has taken me a while to consider that maybe those are different skills.

Maybe noticing an opportunity is one skill.

Building the operation is another.

Selling it is another.

Delivering it consistently is another.

Maybe asking one person to be excellent at all four is not always a sensible definition of entrepreneurship.

And maybe failing to do everything alone is not the same thing as failing.

 

Building a Life I Can Actually Sustain

That idea has started to change how I think about work.

I’m trying to build a self-employed life now, but I’m much less interested in building something impressive than I am in building something sustainable.

I want enough income.

Work that uses my strengths.

Enough structure to feel safe, but enough freedom to breathe.

 

 

A life that doesn’t require me to abandon myself in order to keep it running.

That sounds simple written down.

It isn’t.

I’m still financially vulnerable.

I still have days when I lose access to all the clarity I thought I had yesterday.

I still catch myself measuring my life against people who seem further ahead.

I still don’t fully know which parts of me are genuinely me and which parts are habits built through years of masking and trying to fit.

And I definitely don’t have a neat ending for this story.

That might be the point.

 

Writing From Inside the Story

We often hear stories about struggle after the person has succeeded.

The breakdown becomes the dramatic middle chapter.

The diagnosis becomes the explanation.

The failure becomes useful because the person can now tell us how it all worked out.

I don’t know how mine works out yet.

I’m writing from inside it.

That is why the phrase Failure in Progress keeps making me smile.

Because I am still failing.

I’m failing to tolerate some of the things I used to force myself through.

I’m failing to hide my sensitivity as well as I once did.

I’m failing to become the endlessly productive entrepreneur I thought I should be.

I’m failing to fit some of the definitions of success I inherited.

But the sentence that keeps coming back to me is:

Ultimately, I’m failing at meeting definitions of success that I never examined for validity.

And that kind of failure is starting to feel less like defeat.

It feels more like curiosity.

If I stop trying to succeed at somebody else’s definition of a good life, I have to face a much harder question:

What actually feels true for me?

I don’t have the final answer.

For now, I’m trying to stay curious long enough to find out.