I had a bad day yesterday. I’m not sure how it became a bad day, and that’s not really the point, but it did.

Part of what started it was that it rained torrentially all day long. Seriously, buckets. Cats and dogs. All of it. And here I was, without rain boots (since it rarely rains here), without a rain coat (I’ve had maybe one in my whole life) and sans umbrella (the one I bought the last time it rained broke within a week, and I’m stubbornly resisting buying another). Not only that, but I miscalculated the intensity of the rain and decided to take the long route walking to work. And I had to run to the post office at lunch. What could have been a manageable weather situation just added to my distress because I didn’t have the tools to deal with it properly.

While I trudged around Manhattan, envying the smart people around me with umbrellas and galoshes galore, here’s what I realized: trying to make it through a rainy day without rain gear is like trying to get through a bad day without the proper tools. And, in fact, not that many of us have those tools. Most of us spend our bad days yelling at ourselves for forgetting our umbrellas at home and wondering how it is that everyone else was smart enough to bring theirs while we spend the day with numb toes, damp pants and frizzy hair. There’s also the fact that people are trying to sell us broken umbrellas all over the place that look like they’re going to keep us dry but just leave us wet and carrying around useless broken umbrellas. Broken umbrellas are things like sugar. And caffeine. And beer.

Actually, lots of us only learn how to find real umbrellas after we’ve had a few (or a ton of) run-ins with broken ones. Sometimes we forget where to find the real umbrellas. Sometimes it takes work to find the heavy duty rain gear we need to deal with the deluge, and we give up on ever finding it at all. But the thing is, there will always be another rainy day. Sooner or later, we’ll want to find ways to deal with that and make it to the other side of the storm without getting soaked. Yesterday, I was lucky enough to have two excellent metaphorical umbrellas protecting me, even if I didn’t have any real ones. I had bookmarked blog posts from Havi and Christine just especially because I knew another day like this would come. Their words turned yesterday into something I could deal with. I may not have been as productive as I’d hoped, and I definitely didn’t achieve the loftier objectives on my To Do list, but I made it to the other side. And sometimes, just getting through is something to be proud of.

Do you have any especially useful rain gear for getting through the rainy days? Have you hadbroken umbrella run-ins that left you still looking for real ones?

My past is littered with fear of failure. I quit gymnastics when I was twelve partly because of my fear of flipping off the balance beam or losing my grip on the uneven bars, then tumbling to my death. In high school, it was the paralyzing fear that I would fail my exams in AP Physics class. In college, it was whether the premise for my Grassroots Organizing paper was what my professor wanted to read. And then there’s always been the fear of people not liking me, the big huge enormous fear (vampire, as Michelle calls it) that keeps me from talking to people in lines at coffee shops and asking new friends to hang out. I’ve spent too much time avoiding failure and not enough time failing well.

I just finished readying Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit. It’s a gem of a book, and even if some of Tharp’s methods are too extreme for you, you’ll take away at least something from reading it. While I found much of the book valuable, one chapter had more impact than the others. That chapter’s title? “An ‘A’ in Failure”. I was glad to see this chapter in there, as Tharp sounds like an incredible perfectionist who’s absolutely obsessed with her art. It made me feel good to see failure in her book. She doesn’t just talk about failure as a general concept, but she goes further to classify the different types of failure as she sees them. There’s failure of skills, failure of concept, failure of judgment, failure of nerve, failure through repetition, and failure from denial.

Failure of skill is easy. If you still have more learning to do, then do it. Failure of concept and judgment are more unwieldy. Sometimes we don’t know that we’re making conceptual or judgmental errors until a piece is finished, and we realize that it just doesn’t work. Failure from repetition happens to the best of us. We make something great and spend our next project trying to recreate that greatness. This never works. Failure from denial can be avoided if you realize soon enough that a piece needs work, that it’s just not yet where it needs to be. And then there’s failure of nerve. As I see it, this is an epidemic affliction. Movie studios do multiple test screenings of a movie before releasing it to the public. Television shows get censored in response to the fears of several different parties involved in their production. Nine-to-fivers hold back their innovative ideas for fear the boss won’t go for it. All this avoidance of risk produces a load of mediocrity and a lack of good, old-fashioned, substantive failure.

And this is why I want to fail. I want to rise above mediocrity, even if rising above means producing work that’s imperfect. I want to put ideas out in the world, and I want people to react to them. I want to do what I love and get better at it each year as I get older. It’s easiest to learn from mistakes now. I’m young, still not fully formed, and I can bounce back. I want to reach out to the writers I admire and walk away if they don’t have time for me. Some will, and they will be worth being turned away by others.

Perfection isn’t real, but you might not really know that, really understand that, until you’ve reached outside your comfort zone and landed as far from perfect as you think is possible. Eventually, you’ll circle back like a boomerang, and I guarantee you’ll get closer to your mark the next time around.

When a snow day comes your way, seize it.

If you’re at work all day during that snow day, go sledding after work.

Don’t have snow attire? Not to worry. Just put on several layers of the very nerdiest clothing you own, preferably including your flamingo socks, and get out there.

“And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count.  It’s the life in your years.”

-Abraham Lincoln