A Failure You Experienced II

      When I was 9 years old I elected to take up the accordion, taking on after my sister who excelled at this. My parents took this to be a binding contract until I moved out or won the highest honor of the Accordion Federation of North America Competition, held annually. This highest honor, the rank of AFNA King was a competition division not open to anyone under the age of 17. Either way I was in for as long as I was bound to my parents. An hour a day of practice every single day for 6 months out of the year, 2 hours, for 3 months precluding AFNA Competition and sporadic daily practice during the 3 month off season. Classes were twice a week for my sister and I. I attended hers and had to sit in for the learning. Solo classes were an hour each. Group classes were 90 minutes each. 5 hours a week, plus transportation, with hours extended during competition season. Competiton was everything. My sister won a wallfull of trophies for herself every year. My step-father, Ken proudly put up rows of shelves around her wall to show them all off. I got 3rd place once, honorable mention once. I sat through the long awards ceremonies. Sat through long hours of lectures. I got welts and bruises, beatings for not being good enough. I tried to hide the accordion playing from everyone at school. My parents tried to make sure everyone found out, putting my sister and I in front of cameras at every opportunity. My sister was charismatic and won beauty pageants around the same time she was winning accordion competitions. She could make the accordion look cool. I couldn't. I was getting beat up at school and home, and in the blocks between. Welts and bruises, disappointments and a long childhood of listening to kids talk about video games, sports, tv, technology, family activities, hobbies, parties. Things I couldn't relate to then. Things that weren't a part of my world. I developed a twitch when it came to rhythm, a habit exacerbated by abuse whenever I tried to dance. Ken didn't approve of "faggot behavior". Welts and bruises. I didn't get socialized, but I learned to take a punch, to speak my mind, to handle humiliation. Childhood felt like a failure to me because all I wanted to do was be a kid.

    When I was 9 years old my sister and i were made to watch McNehel & Lehrer News for 2 hours a day and write abstracts on every news topic. This practice continued for a few years. Everything was a test of critical thinking. Writing was a punishment for not cleaning the house well enough, for attempting to forge a report card, for missing washing the dishes and watering the plants for too long, for talking back. I had mixed feelings about writing because it had a fun component. Creativity was fun. Imagination is your friend. Writing about dry subjects, describing a pencil or how to fold a paper airplane was a fiendish toll on my young imagination. Papers had to be re-written several times, until penmanship was clean, punctuation was proper. This was an arduous task given that English was a 4th language for my mother, at least. We argued incessantly over punctuation and grammar. Welts and bruises. I don't use the term "Grammar Nazi" these days because I was beaten for writing badly. But I refuse to declare my shit to be on a par with the fucking Holocaust, or anything that went down in World World II. English Tyrant I can dig. Tyranny is controlling someone's mind, someone's ability and way of communicating. It doesn't implicate nightmarish intent. I learned how to be a writer, but missed out on being a kid. Childhood felt like a failure to me because I wanted it to be a proces of self-exploration but instead it was a process of learning and refining, of skils that tapered early and proved useless. Or shunting of natural rhythm and groove. Or developing useful skills in communication, critical thinking, writing.

      This series of failures polluted the associated gifts with grief and rage, self-doubt. In recent years I've learned to convert these feelings to hunger, ambition. I try to convert all feelings of failure into drive to achieve. Achieving involves learning. There's a lot of paths that have to be dropped because they're not right. I was taught to never be a quitter, and shamed into feeling anxiety over walking away. I've learned to master this emotion and have no sense of lock-down now. Adaptability is key to problem-solving and if one way doesn't work, another can be found. Sometimes the ultimate vision has to be altered. Failure taught me how to work out my frustration and rage, how to think critically, when to walk away, what naturally moves and how to have thick skin, take a beating, speak my mind, shoot from the wit, and sail through situations with fearless abandon. Failure taught me how to succeed.