I don’t know about you, but mornings like this one—the sounds of wind chimes and rays of pre-dawn light greeting me as I sip coffee—are sometimes accompanied by musings about failure. Wait, you say, this sounds depressing already. Not so, I say in return. Hang on.

I just finished reading Brooke Warner’s book, Write on Sisters! Voice, Courage, and Claiming Your Place at the Table. Warner is a publisher and author, and thanks to my brilliant sister, I decided to take one of her classes on publication. I learned a great deal about the industry, but most importantly, I became a part of a community of support and encouragement. These sisters/women used words like love and awesome and amazing with authenticity and ease. The box I had placed myself in? I saw its lid, unfolding, and open to the sky. For a time, like this morning when I was musing on failure, I felt a limitless horizon of possibility. 

Other writers, sisters offered words that welcomed me to the table. I want to do that here, for you.

What is a glorious failure? As Warner describes it, and as I interpret her process, it’s a bunch of questions you ask of your failure. Those inquiries transform what can keep you down into what pushes you forward.

Last summer, I packed a backpack for a week-long solo hike in the Hundred Mile Wilderness in Maine. I’d never backpacked alone and felt both excited and slightly daunted. Within miles of taking off near Katahdin, I tripped over my trekking pole that I’d planted deep between two rocks. It broke into two. Okay, I thought, that’s going to make any stream crossings pretty difficult, maybe impossible. I made it to camp, 11 miles down the trail, an idyllic spot next to a lake. I took my time setting up my tent and found a flat rock on which to perch my stove. I feasted on rehydrated Thai curry and walked the hundred meters or so to the shore. Dusk approached like a blanket settling and I sat until dark, listening to bird calls, the lap of water against rocks underfoot. I climbed in my bag early and waited. I knew they would come, and they did. I dozed and woke again and again to the haunting cry of loons.

I couldn’t move in the morning. My back was out, as they say. It took an hour to dress and get out of the tent, I kid you not. Muscles loosened as I took down camp—that was encouraging—but I still couldn’t manage to get the bear bag I had lodged the night before in the crook of a tree limb. 

I turned back and hiked to where I’d left the car the day before. Every mile or so, niggles of doubt would get me. “Keep going, Kris” and “You are giving up too easily” and “What a fail” all running through my mind. I chose to see the humor in it all. And, I realized just how good that felt. 

I failed gloriously and I’d love to try to do so again. 

Warner asks, “What’s an example of a glorious failure you’ve experienced? And next time you fail, look at how you get up. Because we live in a world that forces us to get up. You will because you have to. But what happens next? How does “what happened” inform your story? How do you need it to inform your story? And how might you intentionally do things differently than you’ve done them in the past? How might you reframe an upsetting failure as a glorious one? The cool part is, you get to decide!”

I fail often, and not infrequently, in painful, embarrassing, and demoralizing ways. Some days I frame my failures as glorious and on others, I want to sit by a window, all by myself, cocooning myself in fear and discouragement. 

I am trying to fail more abundantly and enthusiastically and this has been quite the year for practicing that intention. 

Shame and smallness be gone. Fail big and fail gloriously.