I knew it would happen. I knew sometime this summer during my internship I would have to fall on my face, learn, and pick myself backup again.
Honestly though, I was excited to fail. I had this glorious image in my head of rising up after my failure and moving forward. This expectation I had was similar to walking in front of someone you really want to impress, tripping over your own feet, falling just enough to make you put both hands on the ground and then popping up like nothing happened. Embarrassing? Yes. Big deal? Not really.
I was hoping that it would happen early on into my internship because it wouldn’t be a big deal. Most of the people at work would just blame it on me being a new intern and move on. But this failure came after 8 weeks in the office; enough time to be fully established and in the swing of things.
And it hurt.
It hurt to fail, to be humbled, to be reminded that I’m completely new to the TV industry. For the last 8 weeks I have been putting everything I have into this internship and was feeling good about how much I have learned. And it just hurt.
There is beauty in the fall though. The fact that I failed meant that I was trying something new. It meant that I learned a new limitation of my abilities. It meant that I now had a new challenge, and it was to rise up.
It has been said that it’s not the failure that most people look at, but how you react. Cliche or not, I had to react in the best way I could think of, and that was to imitate Christ through humility. So I apologized. My fault or not, situation aside, I apologized because I knew that I was dealing with more than my internship or a future job, I was dealing with people.
Oh how easy it is during the heat of conflict to forget that you are dealing with people who are just as broken and hurt as you are!
How crucial is it to remember the words of James as he calls us to be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger! I was floored, I mean, my heart was crushed, but I knew that I had a bigger picture.
All of this is to say that the fall happened at a much needed time during my summer. I became so focused on my job, performing well and pushing hard that I forgot about people.
I wasn’t afraid of failure to begin with, but I didn’t see it coming like it did.
Overall, I’m so glad I failed. I needed to feel like dirt under a rug, I needed to understand my limits, I needed to exceed my capacity because now I am able to have a better understanding of myself and what I need to work on.
And we all have something we need to work on.
