Come on. Don’t be upset—yes you’ve failed, but congratulations! Failure is one of the basic freedoms.

–From the Doctor Who episode, Robots of Death

One part of growing up is the process of figuring out what it is that you are good at doing, and what you are not good at doing. We strive to master this process, because failing to do so will result in either wasted potential or wasted time and energy—or possibly both, if you’re really unlucky. For example, deep within you may beat the heart of a master juggler—but you’ll never know it, because you spent all your free time trying in vain to wrap your head around integral calculus.

Notice how I said that this process is part of growing up, rather than a part of childhood. Obviously, growing up is something that one can do for one’s whole life. You don’t ever have to stop testing the boundaries of your abilities, if you don’t want to. We might find it humorous to observe old ladies who take up sky-diving on their 80th birthdays, but it’s actually rather heartening to see that personal growth doesn’t have to stop just because a person is getting quite near the final curtain of total oblivion.

But probing the limits of one’s skills has its moments of existential dread, as well. What if there’s nothing you’re good at? Or worse, what if all the things that you’re good at are negative and destructive? In my own case, I sometimes worry that complaining is the only thing I’ve got any talent for. Well, that and my innate ability to project a sense of bottomless contempt for the entire world and everyone in it, even when I’m in a really, really good mood.

I finished Nanowrimo back in 2007, but I didn’t feel good about it. Those 50,000 words were more a product of bloody-mindedness than anything else—a stubborn refusal to fail at an arbitrary task that I’d set for myself. I did learn a lot: My novel turned out to be a startling insight into my own psyche, built largely on a pile of free associative garbage.

The really surprising thing was what the experience taught me about how I react to the possibility of failure. I normally consider myself a Type B sort of person, or even just a kind of unmotivated, low-energy slacker. But I may be wrong about that. What Nanowrimo—and other low-stakes games—has shown me is that I really dislike failure. And that’s odd, because failure is an integral part of my life. I fail all the time. When I look back at my own personal history, the common thread binding it all together is that I seem to almost always choose failure.

What I started to realize, after that first attempt at Nanowrimo, is that I’ve completely screwed up the process of finding out the things that I might be good at. I may not like to fail–but it seems that I’ll take it, rather than having to put in a lot of arduous work on the off chance that I’ve got an aptitude for whatever it is I’m attempting.

Not that I think that I’m some unexploded volcano of untapped potential or anything. But there’s plenty of things that I love to do, in spite of the fact that I am terrible at them. Surely it’s worth it to gamble my time and effort on those few areas I enjoy, just in case I actually excel at one of them?

What stops me in the end is the dislike I have for wasted effort. I mean I really hate it. I imagine myself at 50, still writing songs that nobody wants to listen to, plugging stupidly away at it, long past the point where it’s all become futile, past the point where the work itself makes me happy.

This year for Nanowrimo, I decided (on the second day) to give myself permission to fail. Actually, I decided to mentally kick my own ass into submission so that I would have no choice but to accept failure. Sick of the mechanics of it all, I decided to make a serious attempt to actually write a lengthy piece of narrative fiction.

I’d given up that dream long ago. But Nanowrimo had gotten me started on writing a novel—why not forget about the word count, and actually attempt something that might just barely be considered readable? So, I tried to write the best book I could. In the end, I only got to about 10,000 words.

Oh, and they stunk.

The whole thing was kind of a fiasco. I budgeted exactly the same amount of time every night that I had done back in 2007. Some nights, I just deleted everything I wrote, because it was so bad. Other nights, I’d end up with a sentence that I thought was okay. But mostly it was garbage.

The thing is that, well, it’s okay that I blew it. I gave it an honest, enthusiastic try; I worked very hard; I poured everything I know about writing onto my computer screen; and the result was just awful. But, at least I know now that writing is not something I have any talent for. A lot of people think they’ve got a great novel in them, and maybe they do–but I don’t. Not even close.

So now, that particular burden has been lifted. The nagging sense that there might be a book in me somewhere, yearning to be released, is completely gone. I feel… drained. And wonderful.