The Core Failure
When failure knocks you out
I had four makeup exams. Four small, perfectly passable exams.
I didn’t show up to any of them.
And that’s how my grand university career spectacularly crashed and burned.
Self-sabotage. Cowardice.
Oh, I bounced back. Of course I did. I worked, struggled, built things. Eventually started my own company. A small, thriving consultancy.
I survived.
Just like I survived so many other failures. Projects that went nowhere. Jobs that didn’t fit. Ideas that crashed. Relationships that frayed.
Every time, I picked myself up. Licked my wounds. Moved on.
Until the day when, for the first time, I couldn’t.
Legs cut out from under me, paralyzed, I stayed down on the mat.
Is life like a boxing ring? Some punches stun you, others knock you out cold.
Listen: failure doesn’t need to be impressive to be crushing.
It’s not about scale or visibility. Even less about what others think.
Failing your driver’s test for the third time, ruining a carefully prepared dinner, fighting with your child... what makes a failure devastating isn’t its size.
It’s the impact it has on us.
I didn’t lose a child. I didn’t go bankrupt. I didn’t miss the Olympics. I didn’t divorce after 20 years of marriage.
There are failures far “bigger” than mine. And yet.
So if reading my story makes you think “But her failure isn’t that bad, mine is much worse,” know that I’m not comparing. I’m not ranking.
Or if you think “But mine is so much smaller,” know that it doesn’t change anything either.
If it hurts, it matters. Period.
Let’s cut to the chase: I’ve had more than my share of failures.
Like everyone else.
University, obviously, but not just that.
Abandoned training programs. A heart broken and stitched back together dozens of times. Jobs taken and fled just as quickly. Expensive hobbies gathering dust in the attic.
A bit of everything.
Failures so invisible they slid off me without even registering, to the point where I moved on without a second thought. And others, shameful mishaps that left my pride scraped, wounded, battered, requiring a period of convalescence.
I’ve laughed, doubted, gotten angry. I’ve even cried every tear I had, bitter and desperate.
Still, every time, I gritted my teeth, bandaged my wounds, and went back into the arena... even if it meant running straight into another wall, another failure.
So why?
Why this sudden collapse ? Why there? Why over that?
After all, it was just another setback.
Had I taken so many hits that my ego, worn threadbare, eventually gave out? Why that punch, rather than another? Was it the one too many?
No.
This time, something was different.
Alright, enough suspense. Here’s what happened.
I wrote a book.
Because I was about to turn forty and if I didn’t do it right then, I never would.
It wasn’t a bestseller, never made the New York Times list, but at my level, it hit the jackpot.
Literary prizes. An agent. A spot in a TV series writers’ room. Doors opened on their own.
For the first time, I’d succeeded at what truly mattered to me. My lifelong dream: writing.
Finally!
Except.
I lost the agent. The series was aborted mid-writing. The second book? Not good enough. Never really delivered.
Everything collapsed.
And for the first time in my life, I stayed down.
Me, who since those failed exams had always managed to get back up — no matter what crumbled, no matter what didn’t work — this time, I couldn’t.
I was paralyzed. Destroyed.
Unable to write. Unable to start again. Unable even to try.
Questions came from everywhere.
From my circle first. “So, that second book?” “What are you writing now?” “Can’t wait to read what’s next!”
From acquaintances, with polite curiosity: “How’s the writing going?”
From people I’d run into who were surprised: “Why haven’t we seen anything new?” “When are you publishing?” “Have you stopped writing?”
Each question was another blow. A reminder. Pressure.
Because underneath the curiosity and concern, I always heard the same thing:
“How come you could bounce back from everything else... but not this?”
What made this failure so unique? So insurmountable?
And that’s when I saw the pattern.
It’s both very simple and deeply twisted.
All those past failures — school, projects, detours — I’d been able to overcome them because even though they bruised my pride to varying degrees, they didn’t go much deeper than that.
They didn’t really matter.
They were, all things considered, just projects, choices, circumstances. Nothing more. Almost dummy failures.
Practice failures.
They hurt. They made me doubt. But they didn’t question who I fundamentally was.
But this failure? It shook me to the core.
Because it didn’t touch what I did. It touched who I was.
Me, who’d always presented myself as the author. The writer-in-becoming.
It wasn’t a project collapsing. It was me disintegrating.
In the one thing that truly mattered to me.
And that discovery could only mean one thing. If I tried again and failed again, there’d be no doubt left.
I wasn’t who I thought I was.
No escape. Just reality, raw and bare.
My foundations demolished, all at once.
The core failure.
Understanding the pattern is one thing. Getting out of it is another.
Because no, I didn’t get back up alone by snapping my fingers. I didn’t have an epiphany one morning while brushing my teeth and boom !, all fixed.
I struggled. For a long time. In the dark.
I was afraid. All the time. Of starting again. Of failing again. Of confirming that I didn’t actually have what it takes to be a writer.
That kind of paralysis doesn’t dissolve with willpower and inspirational quotes.
So I did something I hated: I asked for help.
My inner circle first. Those who saw me crawling and didn’t look away. Who told me: “You can’t stay here.” “You’re allowed to be scared AND keep going.” “Stop telling yourself stories.”
Phrases that sting. That hurt. But that wake you up.
And then, because loved ones aren’t always enough, I found a coach. Someone external. Someone who owed me nothing, had no history with me, who could hold up a mirror without mercy.
It was long. Uncomfortable. Sometimes humiliating.
I had to accept saying out loud: “I don’t know how to do this.” “I’m scared.” “I’m paralyzed.”
Me, who’d always handled everything alone, who overcame everything so easily.
But it was in that work — in those difficult conversations, in those painful questions — that I began to understand.
The difference between failures where I could still get up easily, and the one where I had to learn to get up differently.
We live in a society that hates failure. Not a reproach, barely a bitter observation.
It treats it like a shameful disease, to be hidden and forgotten as quickly as possible, never to be mentioned, even in the safety of family.
We celebrate success stories, flawless trajectories, meteoric rises. We carefully erase the failures, missteps, moments of doubt.
As a result, we only consider two ways to handle failure:
Ignore it. Pretend it never happened. Move on. Never speak of it again. Erase it from our CV, our memory, our story.
Avoid it. Never take the risk. Never launch. Stay in what we know, what’s safe, what won’t expose us.
And if by chance the failure was too glaring ? If by its nature or consequences, we couldn’t ignore, hide or escape from it?
Then its victim — its perpetrator — would be harshly judged. On one hand, as an idiot who didn’t see it coming. On the other, as a poor unfortunate worthy of pity.
Either way: ostracism. Sideways glances. A topic avoided at dinners. Double jeopardy, really.
And this failure-taboo culture, we pass it down from school. We refuse the very idea of failure, supposedly to spare children. Failure must fail! We’re manufacturing adults who mentally collapse at the first real setback.
We don’t teach them that failure isn’t a verdict. An end in itself. It’s data. Information: “This wasn’t the result I expected.”
But especially, we don’t teach them to move through failure. To live with it. To draw something from it.
So what do we do? We avoid. We protect ourselves. We choose paths where we risk nothing.
We carefully avoid launching into what matters too much.
Because if it fails, we won’t be able to ignore it or pretend it never existed. It’ll be too obvious. Too painful. Too real.
We prefer not to try. Stay in our comfort zone. Boring, sure, but predictable. Safe.
It’s more convenient.
Yet failure is a brilliant teacher. Precious, even.
If we take it as information — the result obtained is different from what we expected — failure tells us something essential: the actions we took weren’t appropriate.
That path doesn’t lead where we wanted to go.
It’s not a judgment. It’s data. A signal. A compass showing us: “Not that way.”
It teaches us to handle things emotionally.
By making us experience disappointment, letdown, frustration. By connecting us with emotions that, while negative, are nonetheless real.
Because we’ll encounter these emotions anyway, sooner or later in our lives. Whether by our own doing or unfortunate chance.
Learning to move through them on small mishaps prepares us to face them when the earthquake hits.
In my case, my practice failures had taught me something essential.
They’d taught me that I could fall without breaking.
They’d also taught me that if the game was worth the candle, I was capable of adjusting my aim.
In short, they’d taught me that we can survive. Adapt. Build despite everything.
And then, it clicked :
It was my perception — and only my perception — that made this failure a defining moment for my person. A core failure.
Not the event itself. My way of seeing it. My way of letting it touch my identity rather than my work.
As if the slightest misstep in this domain made me a failure as a person.
But my core failure wasn’t proof that I wasn’t who I thought I was.
Just that I still had things to learn.
So I decided to see it for what it really was. An aim to adjust, an approach to adapt... a failure. Just a failure.
From there, only one recourse remained: I tried, it didn’t work, what do I do now?
You know what?
I hurt. For a long time. I doubted. Deeply.
But I survived. And I started again.
Let’s be honest: where am I? At the beginning.
I’ve taken up writing again. In fact, this newsletter you’re reading is proof.
I’ve started creating again. I’m putting things in place. I spend time caressing this imaginary world of mine.
Are these the right actions I’m taking? Only the future will tell.
But at least I’m no longer paralyzed.
I put one foot in front of the other. I move forward.
And if I fall again? Well, I’ll get back up. Adjust. And start again.
Because here’s the real lesson:
The tools you develop on practice failures, you can apply to the core failure.
The capacity to get back up. To continue. To not let failure define who you are.
Everything you learned surviving small failures? That’s exactly what you need to survive the big one.
Success begins when you accept responsibility for your failures.
All your failures. From the most invisible to the most crushing.
Those where you really tried. Where you put your heart in. And where it didn’t work.
And especially, those where you gave up before even trying. Out of fear. Out of convenience.
Because it’s these failures that truly teach us who we are.
Understanding the difference
Practice failures touch the ego.
It’s the failure that makes us stumble without destroying us. The one we sometimes orchestrate, consciously or not. That scrapes the ego but doesn’t break our momentum.
It’s the failure where we can still get up relatively easily. Where we can find explanations, reasons, lessons. Where we can transform the experience into something manageable.
We think it humiliates us, when actually it prepares us. It’s often in these learning failures that resistance is forged: they leave bruises on our self-esteem, but not permanent fractures.
Of course, in the moment, it feels like trauma. In reality, it’s a dress rehearsal: terrain where we learn to fall to better know how to get up.
In short, the training failure is a cruel but loyal teacher: it hurts us just enough to understand, never enough to stop us from trying again.
It doesn’t touch our foundations.
The core failure touches identity.
The core failure isn’t a simple fall: it’s an internal earthquake. It doesn’t just scratch the surface of the ego, it cracks the foundations of who we thought we were.
It paralyzes because it questions everything: not only what we do, but what we are. After it, there’s no more innocence possible.
It’s the failure that questions our very identity.
It scares us so much that we’re ready for anything — even to fail elsewhere, even and especially to avoid launching ourselves — rather than risk it.
Because deep down, we know that after it, we won’t be the same.
That we’ll have to face reality. And perhaps rebuild differently.
It’s the failure that silences. The one that leaves us speechless, as if our very identity had collapsed with it.
The core failure is the wound that never quite closes. But it’s also, sometimes, the only tremor powerful enough to force us to rebuild differently.
On real foundations. In reality.
📝 The Mirror Exercise (10 minutes)
You’re here because a failure paralyzed you. Because this time, you can’t bounce back like before.
Let’s take time to understand why.
Step 1: Name it
Write in a few words the failure that paralyzes you. No details. Just naming it is enough.
Step 2: The only question that matters
“What does this failure reveal about me?”
Write everything that comes. No filter. No censorship.
“I’m not enough...”
“I am...”
“I’ll never be...”
That’s what’s destroying you.
This belief about yourself that you’re letting the failure redefine.
Your vision of who you are.
And that’s why you can’t bounce back like before.
Because it’s not a blow to the ego. It’s a blow to identity.
And understanding which part of your identity was touched is the first step to rebuilding it.
In the next letter, we’ll talk about imposter syndrome. About that voice that says “you’re not legitimate.” And how I learned to create despite it.
Because spoiler: it never really goes away. You just learn to work with it.
