2023 What a fecking challenge...

So, after declaring 2022 'The year of Joy' and the universe making me work REALLY bloody hard for it, I was a reluctant to set any NYE resolutions heading into 2023. I figured even a word to guide me was a bad idea and my approach was to simply cruise into January with no plans, no expectations, no nothing. 

As per, the universe had a bloody good laugh at that idea. We had barely hit Valentine's Day when I understood that this year; without a shadow of a doubt, would be a year to challenge me. 

Actually, maybe by being hospitalised and on a drip with gastro after tearing my MCL at a water park immediately upon arriving back to Oz back in mid-January it was clear enough that 2023 might have a whiff of challenge about it. But I don’t like to call things too early.  

Sometimes the challenges of the last year were of my own (un)doing: getting into an ice bath, 75 hard, a new puppy. Though to be honest, I was three wines in when I agreed to the last one, so I'm not sure Pearl is all my fault. The family knew when to catch me. Essentially, drunk as I mourned my mum on her birthday.  

It'll come as no surprise I'm sure though, that with each and every challenge over the last year, came both growth and that almost addictive hit of adrenaline. Even within those that I failed miserably at.

And at times I did of course. Fail I mean. 

Dry November hit 16 days before I gave up. 75 Soft never really started... and as most other

years, my son refused to fit into the mould school tries to make him and we had days of tears, fights, frustration and upset until he found his very small tribe and would at least go and survive the day. Even if, as I repeatedly heard, his progress was slow and no reflection of his true capabilities. Subtext, mum fail.  

That's kinda the point of a challenge though, isn't it? That it's something with enough struggle that you might not make it over the line, or within the set time frame and all your limbs still working anyway. But in that final stretch, that belly crawl to the end dragging your dignity and a broken shoe in a Tesco bag, you can really learn something? Even if it's only that you're surrounded by a pretty great team as they pick you up and carry you the last 500m. Or that you're not and you need new friends/family stat.  

As part of my new(ish) role as an Allied Health Assistant one of the things I have to explicitly teach most of the kids I work with it is that it's OK to fail. It is normal. It's expected. It's actually of massive value. We grow more brain connections when we learn how NOT to do something than in just breezing through. If we dare to fail, we puzzle, we reframe, we grow a fucking spine and we go again.  

Unless, of course, we don't.  

And maybe that's the bigger challenge that I am seeing right now and I'm falling into myself at times. That we're not willing to step up and give the really hard shit a go and share that experience. We're all nail it or quietly slink away.  

Are we so used to seeing success around us that“winning” has become the point now and not the bumpy road to get there? That we put stock in the photo-finish-high-fives rather than the mountain trek? And if our goal is that high of success, do we tend to choose the hard we know we can accomplish over any others these days? Hard enough.  

I wonder if we're all so afraid of fucking it up and really getting uncomfortable that we're not truly challenging ourselves anymore with anything much. That we’re always choosing a goal we shouldn’t miss and if we’re not sure we're outsourcing the solutions to any struggles because ‘we don't know’ and we need to get it right because, you know, consequences.  

At the most recent school meeting, I heard again about how 'average' my 'actually brilliant' son is presenting and it was suggested I get some kind of diagnosis and medication. Something which as an ex-teacher and an Allied Health Assistant married to a Dr I knew that I could absolutely do. But I also knew that it was absolutely unnecessary. At this point at least. He needs to work on himself (with me or an OT or a coach or whatever), grow in confidence, take guidance and most crucially inhabit the space to fail at social relationships in order to work out how to forge them. Essentially, to live within his challenges a little first.  

And this got me thinking. Why are we so quick to find solutions for our failures and to iron out our quirks? To only look at the wins? I've finished 75 Hard, got a lot more attention than I gave up on 75 Soft - not least because I promoted that a lot better. 

We seem now to have the expectation that everything should be OK and easy and good. To have everyone, even an 8yo boy - surely the last vestige of awkward if ever there was one - feel 'happy and confident' all the time. For us all to be winning.  

What happened to taking a bit of time to see how it played out; or to fucking things up and to staying right there for a while in the kinda stuck?  

I do wonder if sometimes sitting in self-reflection is now only the realm of those of us the morning after drinking too much. Or Hangxiety as it's called. Yep. It's named. It's a thing.  

A morning after shame to work through. Often by nervously sending out feeler texts about feeling 'tired and yet super grateful to get to hang out past our usual mum bedtime'. The aim of which are basically to see if there's no reply, or a frosty reply, and if we did, indeed, say or do something extra twatty and have been exiled from the fray forever more for our Aperol Spritz fuelled sins. Ones like suggesting a particular playgroup or school was, in our opinion, a bit shit.

This right here seems to still be a space to (over)think about stuff. At least for me. Luckily one with a fairly short timeframe though. Google says we'll feel better, whatever our conclusions, within 24-48 hours after all.  

So on the whole have we convinced ourselves that mostly challenges are things that pave the way neatly these days for wins. Conveniently ignoring that they are actually a massive part of everyday life that makes us feel useless for a while (sometimes quite a long while) before we accept or we adapt? 

When I was in school, there were no ribbons for participation and it was abundantly clear you were shite at something because you came 11th and no one said 'good try'.  

Maths was set. If you were in sets 1 or 2 you were quite smart. Sets 3 or 4, you were average. If you were in 5 or 6 (and they were named FIVE and SIX respectively along with the other numbers and not all referred to as some colour coded thing like yellow ducks to mask the levelling) you were dead thick when it came to maths. But oddly, no one gave a flying fuck. It was, what it was.  

I'd have been as confused with a participation ribbon as I would with the concept of a phone not attached to the wall in 1993. If you were crap at something, you were crap and you and everyone else knew it. But by being called out as shite at stuff, that was always where we found actual challenge.  

If I was shite I could try and get better. And sometimes I did. I could work my arse off and actually get a C at GSCE maths and be told by Mr Hyde that ‘…he didn’t see that one coming’ when I collected my results. I could get better and I could feel, as a result, on top of the fucking world.  

Often, it was a choice to put in the effort or not when it came to stuff that was a challenge.  

I accepted I was always going to be properly rubbish at design tech (in which I superglued my finger to my thumb making a miniature bird table). And cooking (where I mistook the polystyrene base for an inbuilt baking tray when cooking boxed pizza and ruined an oven). But I did decide that I'd like to improve at tennis, so I paired with the best tennis player in the year in the doubles tournament and paid attention. Savvy as well as enlightening.  

Sometimes as a kid the challenge wasn’t to win but to improve. Or to grow in yourself by understanding and accepting who you were and where you were. And that it was probable, you did not have the miniature garden competition in the bag. Nor the tennis ladder. And that was OK.  

In the normality of our failures back in the day we forged friendship and found allies. We saw struggle and sadness. We lost and we grew.  

We compared and contrasted and we came up short. Often.

We weren’t told we were good for trying. We knew that. We understood what challenge really was and we were fine not to rise to it at times. Or to be disappointed in our almosts or our total flops. To know others were better than us. In that particular thing at least. 

So I guess what I found, in 2023 and the challenges I undertook, was that I need not to have bothered. That for whatever I opted to take on, the universe would send more threefold my way, because that is the nature of being a human. It's often a challenge in its own right.

Maybe we choose hard enough now because we don't have the answers or the stamina for much more in the challenge that is every day life as a grown up.

But actually, we might do.

If we pause and decide to. And most importantly, if we once again learn to accept that near misses and outright failure are also crucially valuable too; that our failures are also huge wins.