Everyone Should Tell You That You’re Gonna Lose

Very few people are prepared for failure. In fact, not a lot of people know how to deal with the fact that you win very little in life.  

I remember my first encounter with this notion in undergraduate college when one of my favorite professors told the class the percentage of students who would likely go onto graduate school and make it into the profession. I don’t remember the exact number; it was extremely low, hardly a percentage point or two. I just remember some students in the class complaining that she should not be saying that and me thinking that it is important to know what we are getting ourselves into and the statistical rates of success. Because I maintained being on the dean’s list in undergrad and president’s list in graduate school and was rewarded with marginal successes through writing in my program, I had no real idea what failure meant.  

It started with getting rejections on my poetry and stories after college. You hear all these things about the number of places you need to send your work before you get accepted and the tiers, but it is hard to imagine. You have specific places in mind. You heard about a place. You want it there. You receive a rejection. Best of luck placing it elsewhere and feel free to send us future work. Now where? Is everyone submitting to the same places? What makes your work a good fit?  

Failure became a person, became an embodied text, became a life.  

In a society that classifies things as a competition, where there are winners and losers, I became a discard because I was not a good fit. I was too queer but not lesbian or a gay man. I was too trans but not flexible to my audience’s demands. I was white and had been born into an upper middleclass family but had lived in poverty and been houseless despite being educated. I had been in a civil commitment.  

These are all classifications that privilege and disadvantage me.  

The more I have accepted that I am going to lose; the more grateful I have become for my successes. The more I understand their great significance and that they have absolutely no significance at the same time in the bigger picture of the universe.  

There are as many of me as there are people in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Yemen, and Syria.