Failure Is an Option

Status Update

I’ve searched local markets for scifi-fantasy magazines to whom I could send my short story. I found none. I’ll have to go online and order back copies from the names in my publisher’s guide. I have another slice-of-life short story that needs a home. I’m looking for possibilities. Didn’t hear from the Ladies Home Journal about an entry for its essay contest, so I can assume I’m free to use it elsewhere such as this blog. Everyone can relate to learning from failure or being doomed to repeat it

Failure Is an Option 

I allowed myself to fail—eventually.  It took about five years. Second in my high-school class and earning a bachelor’s degree while on full scholarships, I had been taught that intelligent people from New England Puritan stock, especially those handed such opportunities, had no business failing.

I tried. I dug in, sometimes by mere fingertips, fighting each whisper of doubt and the ever-growing pile of accusing, incomplete tasks on the desk of my first career-building job. The gift of a small “Best Secretary” plaque mocked me. Perhaps you should never have reached beyond that, my mind whispered. Second thoughts of course made not a whit of difference.

I advanced from administrative assistant at an insurance company to data programmer and excelled at a local college course for the computer language the company used. I love words—the look on the page, the sound off the tongue, and its clever usage—even when written in code. In-house training introduced me to the existing programs that blended four branches of incoming data. Seasoned programmers, I later learned, quailed at such informational overload.

With the degree of complexity, lines tended to tangle. It was the programmer’s job to untangle problems and introduce new commands. I wrote with concise elegance, when I could figure out where the problem originated and how the new code needed to be integrated. The existing programs baffled my every attempt to decipher them. Told on-the-job experience would solve the problem, it didn’t.

More next time. Please feel free to leave comments on your own experiences.