Hey, amige. Today we're talking about failure. Because you've already survived every single one of yours. And that's exactly what makes you the hot, healed girlie that we are celebrating this summer. Buen día, mi gente, and welcome back to La Vida Más Chévere de Childfree Latinas. I'm your host and resident childfree Latina, Paulette Erato. And yes, it's been a minute and I haven't exactly been living my best life lately. Not because of any toxic cultural norms, thankfully, but if you heard the last episode, you know what's up. Let's just say that I'm back for now. I wanted to do something I'm calling the Healing Girl Summer because I'm still healing and I want us all to be able to move forward in a healthy way. Plus, I don't know if you heard, but healing girlies are hot girlies and this is our time. What that means is you're gonna get four episodes pulled from a little book I wrote for my niece years ago called Benchmarks Are Bullshit. You've probably heard me reference it before. The whole thing has six lessons, so if you want them all you can buy it for$19 through the link in the show notes. And I think you should because it helped me heal a little when I wrote it and I think reading it will do the same for you. The premise is simple. These are the lessons I wish I'd known at 18. But for realsies, this is the type of content worth revisiting at any age because sometimes you just need a reminder of the stuff you already know. We've already lived it. Sometimes we just forget. So this is episode one of four. I'm gonna start by reading you this lesson. Lesson one is failure is okay and expected. After you get past the shock of your first failure, you finally learn to start growing from it. It turns out sometimes your best still isn't good enough. Look, I'm five foot three inches tall. That is the best height I am ever going to be. But no matter how hard I try, no matter how high the heels, I will never be six feet tall. I will never be able to reach the top shelf at the grocery store without some help. But I had grown up believing that I was incapable of failing. It just wasn't allowed. I was kinda good at a lot of things, so I might as well have been six feet tall. So when it finally happened, when I finally failed, it's like my identity, the very definition of my existence, was completely shattered. That person I was no longer existed. It felt like she had been a lie. Except she wasn't. That was merely a shiny fake veneer that had to be peeled off before the real me could emerge. And failing is so much easier after the first time. It's definitely less shocking and much less identity shattering. It actually becomes a way to solve problems. Oh, that solution didn't work? Well, let's try the next one instead. And what was this first memorable, monumental failure? Getting a D on a test that I'd studied my ass off for. It was freshman year in college, and I was racking my brain. Did I not study enough? Did I read the wrong material? Did I not get enough rest? Was I too nervous? Does it even matter now over 20 years later? No. And the irony is that test was for a subject that wasn't even in my major. So the takeaway here is fail, baby, and fail often. You know, I've talked about this a lot on other people's podcasts, but weirdly never my own, so let me back up. Before you could have ever failed at anything that mattered, you failed at something much more fundamental. And something you probably take for granted every single day. Mi amigue, you failed at walking. Over and over and over again, you fell down, but you got back up. Nobody judged you for it, and nobody pulled you inside and said, "Mija, maybe walking isn't for you." Instead, they celebrated every single attempt, whether you stuck the landing or you face-planted into the carpet. Remember, how did your parents or your guardians encourage you to walk? How do we encourage babies to walk now? We literally applaud every time we see them try it. And if you cried when you fell on your ass, they made it to be no big deal. They didn't let you wallow. Instead, they encouraged you to try it again. Immediately. Fall down, get back up. Why? Because if you had let this stop you, if you'd stayed on the ground for too long, you'd get too comfortable, and then you probably wouldn't learn to walk. Is this beginning to sound like something else you might be familiar with? Like your comfort zone? You see the similarities, right? Because being able to walk, to ambulate on your own, is a huge deal, no? And now, if you're an able-bodied person, you walk, you run, you dance, you hike, you cross the street while looking at your phone instead of the traffic because sometimes we commit pendejadas. But you do all this because you survived the failure of learning to walk.'Cause that's all all of those things are. Running, dancing, hiking, they're all advanced forms of walking, skills that were built on a foundation of falling down, on a foundation of failure. So why, at some point in our lives, did we decide that falling down stopped being part of the process? I can tell you that for me it happened really early, because I grew up in a house where failure wasn't really an option, and maybe you did too. My dad, may he rest in peace, I guess, was strict, and I happened to be naturally good at a lot of things I tried; piano, school, leadership. I think I was even my sixth grade class vice president. So failure wasn't something I had a lot of practice with after learning to walk. Or, to put it better, the ways I did fail were small, so they didn't count, and they weren't something I bothered examining'cause they happened in private, right? As long as the facade of perfection stayed intact on the outside, the small cracks underneath, they didn't count. I didn't have to deal with them. And then came college. I got into Wharton, which of course I did, and I've talked about this on the perfectionism episode. I'll link that in the show notes. And if you don't know, Wharton is the business school at the University of Pennsylvania. It's an Ivy League institution, which is why that episode is called The Ivy League Dropout. I was 18, and I thought I'd made it. My life is set. So fast-forward to the spring semester of freshman year, and I got a D on that test. Again, in a class that wasn't even in my major. But I want you to understand what that did to 18-year-old me. It wasn't just embarrassing or just disappointing. It shattered my entire identity. All of a sudden, "I don't belong here" was the only idea in my head. And the person I thought I was, the whole future I had planned in front of me, the person who didn't fail. She just ceased to exist, and I didn't know who was left. That spiraled me into a depression that lasted years. I left school. I came home to a father who could not, or would not, understand how I'd thrown away that opportunity. That was so crushing, that whole experience. I'm so glad I don't feel that way anymore.'cause here's what I know at this big age now that I didn't know at 18. I wasn't broken. I was just unprepared. I'd never really had the room to practice failing at anything low-stakes, and even if I had, those we kept hidden, right? Because anything I failed at was such a source of shame that I kept that locked up tight in a vault. So when the first real failure hit, I hadn't built up the tolerance for it. I didn't have the calluses for it. I didn't have any training at all in how to fail. I had no idea that this, this was survivable. It is, by the way, extremely survivable. Let's take scientists, for example, actual scientists, the ones who know the most about how the world works. They spend their entire careers trying to disprove their own theories on purpose. They design experiments specifically to break what they believe to be true. Because a theory that can survive every attempt to disprove it is the only one worth trusting. Failure isn't the opposite of the scientific method. It's the whole damn point. So what if we took that approach to our own lives? Here's how I know I'm healing that place inside myself. Last year, I burnt a pot of rice. It was my first time making Puerto Rican rice, and I didn't burn it in a good way. I didn't make pegao, which, if you don't know, is the crispy part at the bottom. That's the actual goal of making Puerto Rican rice. No, I mean, I burned it to hell. There was nothing edible left. I basically made something no human should ever be forced to eat. But do you think I tore myself up, doubted my Latinidad, doubted my Boricua roots? Claro que no. I just threw it out and went back to making rice the way I know is foolproof. I haven't tried it again, but I will, eventually. And that's it. That's the whole story. Because at this big age, failure has become second nature. For me, it's just information. If that solution didn't work, we're gonna try another one. The rice wasn't great. Okay, cool. Next time, adjust the heat. The D on the test, when it happened, it hurt. It caused depression. But it turns out it didn't ruin my life. There's a movie that captures this perfectly. Maybe you've heard of this little Disney animated feature called Encanto. The whole film is about a family where each character is so trapped in the story of their personal magic that they can't relax. They can't show failure. They can't show the cracks, even when the house itself is cracking. Because if they fail, the magic will disappear. Luisa, the strong eldest daughter, actually says in her song, "Who am I if I don't have what it takes?" I just rewatched it yesterday, and wow, did that hit me. All of that, that entire movie, is an illustration of generational trauma. So baby, let's not keep carrying that along our path. Give yourself permission to let it go. Permission to try something and have it not work. Permission to not be good at it yet. Permission to fail, because that's permission to be human. Which you already learned by walking, which you failed at a lot. What else can you fail at next? And that's my question to you. If you're carrying around a failure that felt bigger than it was, I wanna hear about it. There's a link in the show notes to text me directly from your phone. Tell me your lesson, the one you learned the hard way. I would really love to hear from you. And once again, if you want all six lessons, the whole Benchmarks Are Bullshit manuscript is a PDF available for 19 bucks through the link in the show notes. It was written for an 18-year-old, but I promise it holds up at your big age, too. And that's a burrito.