Don't Confront Me With My Failures

"Don't confront me with my failures. I have not forgotten them."

Jackson Browne sang that years ago in "These Days" and it kills me every time I get to that part of that song, because it's all of us, right?

We know our failures.

• We know.

• We know.

• We know.

The failures, oh how they ache.

And pulse.

And ring a bell loud in the midnight air when we should be sleeping but instead we are slipping into the awake darkness, going down the slide we don't want but we find ourselves plummeting, fast, fast, faster. The mental hole of whyaminotbetter and whatthefuckamidoing and iamafailure.

Until something shakes the mental ground beneath us and we pull ourselves up and out of the abyss, like a child trying to walk up a slide. It's easier to slip down than walk up.

But we walk up.

And confront our failures, and (hopefully) learn from them. Precisely because we have not forgotten them.

Bonus read: You Are Not a Failure.