Failure After Success

One of the strangest things about failure is that it doesn’t always show up when you’re struggling.

Sometimes it shows up right after a win.

You teach a great class. Direct a great show. Get accepted to a festival. Receive a standing ovation. Sell tickets. Launch a program. Things are moving. People are congratulating you. From the outside, it looks like everything is working.

Then the next thing doesn’t.

The workshop doesn’t fill. The audition numbers are low. The email gets ignored. The proposal gets rejected. The show doesn’t land the way you hoped. The thing you were excited about falls flat.

And somehow that one thing becomes louder than everything that came before it. At least it does for me.

What fascinates me is how different failure looks from the outside than it feels on the inside.

From the outside, people see momentum.

They see the classes, the performances, the festivals, the social media posts, the announcements. They see someone who is creating and producing and teaching and performing.

From the outside, it can look like confidence.

Inside, it can feel like you’re making it up as you go. Inside, it can feel like every new project is an opportunity for someone to discover you have no idea what you’re doing. Inside, it can feel like all the success in the world is being held together with duct tape and crossed fingers.

And if you live with rejection sensitive dysphoria, failure rarely arrives as simple disappointment. It arrives as a verdict.

The workshop didn’t fill becomes nobody wants what you’re offering.

The rejection becomes you’re not good enough. The setback becomes proof that all the previous successes were somehow mistakes.

I know that sounds dramatic. But so is my brain.

My AuDHD brain is constantly looking ahead. Constantly connecting dots. Constantly building stories. It’s one of the things that serves me well as an improviser.

When I’m performing long form, part of my brain is often tracking multiple threads at once. Relationships. Themes. Possibilities. I’m seeing where things might go while trying to stay present in where they are.

It’s a skill on stage. It’s a challenge off stage.

Because when something goes wrong, my brain doesn’t stop with what happened. It immediately starts predicting everything that might happen next.

One failure becomes ten imaginary failures.

One rejection becomes an entire future of rejection.

One disappointing result becomes a story about who I am.

That’s usually when I need to remind myself of something improv has taught me over and over again. In improv, we talk about mistakes all the time. A missed offer. A forgotten name. A scene that never finds its footing. A show that doesn’t connect.

The audience usually forgets those moments within seconds.

The performers remember them for years.

What I’ve learned is that the best improvisers aren’t the ones who avoid failure. They’re the ones who recover from it fastest. They don’t spend the next scene apologizing for the previous one. They don’t stop making choices because one choice didn’t work. They stay in the game.They keep listening. They keep responding. They keep making offers. They trust that one rough moment doesn’t define the entire show.

That’s the lesson I’m still learning.

Not how to avoid failure. How to recover from it. How to let disappointment be disappointment without turning it into identity. How to acknowledge something didn’t work without deciding that I don’t work. How to feel the sting without writing the ending.

Because the truth is, if you’re creating things, you’re going to fail. If you’re putting work into the world, you’re going to be rejected. If you’re taking risks, some of them won’t pay off.

That’s not evidence that you’re on the wrong path.

It’s evidence that you’re actually moving.

The people who never fail aren’t the people who figured it out. They’re usually the people who stopped making offers. So these days, when something falls flat, I’m trying to treat it the same way I would a struggling improv scene.

Take a breath.

Pay attention to what’s actually happening instead of the story I’m telling myself about what’s happening.

Stay connected. Trust the process. And make another offer.

Because the scene isn’t over. And neither am I.