Decolonizing Failure
I was taught to fear failure.
To hide it.
Rewrite it.
Turn it into a story about resilience.
But some things just fall apart.
Sometimes you lose the job.
Say the wrong thing.
Miss the sign.
And no one claps
for your growth.
I was taught to fix things.
Patch them.
Polish them.
Smile through them.
Failure meant I wasn’t enough.
Wasn’t trying hard enough.
But I was tired.
And sometimes
things break
because they were never whole to begin with.
The worst failures were quiet.
The time I didn’t stand up for someone.
The time I made my child flinch with my voice.
The time I said “yes”
when I should have said
I don’t know how.
The deepest failures were invisible.
When I put everyone’s needs above my own.
When I stopped singing.
When I measured my worth
by how useful I could be.
No one noticed.
Except me.
But failure has been the most honest teacher.
It stripped away the performance.
It showed me who still stayed.
Who I still was
when the plan collapsed.
It taught me how to say
I’m sorry
and mean it
without needing to be forgiven.
Failure slowed me down.
It gave me softness.
It returned me to the kitchen,
to the mirror,
to the long walk
with no destination.
It let me meet myself again—
not as a project,
but as a person
who was always worth loving.
We failed at parenting sometimes.
We snapped.
We missed the signs.
We passed on wounds
we swore we’d heal.
But son—
you still talk to me.
Daughter—
you still come home.
And maybe that’s grace.
We failed at marriage sometimes.
I closed the door.
You disappeared into your head.
We forgot we were on the same side.
But we found our way back
not because we succeeded,
but because we stayed
after the silence.
Decolonizing failure means
we stop measuring worth
by outcome.
It means we honour what cracks
not to glorify pain,
but to witness what survives it.
It means teaching our children:
You will fall.
You will hurt.
You will miss.
And still—
you will be worthy of love.
Especially then.
