Failing to Success

At the end of my high school swimming career, I felt totally demoralized and defeated. I’d spent my senior year doing double workouts, every morning at 5-7 am and every afternoon after school from 4-6. I had one goal: making it to state in one of my events. This wasn’t an unreasonable goal after three years of swimming, at least I didn’t think so. And yet, I didn’t make it. I was one place off in one of my events, but it was discouraging, after all the work I’d put in. (I can see now some of the problems, including not eating properly).

I’d also had an extremely challenging academic schedule at school, including 4 AP classes and 2 400-level college German classes. The message from the universe/God seemed to be: you are not athletic. You are smart and you should focus there, so that’s what I was determined to do.

I’d asked my swim coach to write a letter for my scholarships, which was an unusual thing to do, but I think he really respected me and I trusted him. At the end of that last miserable Regional meet, the coach pulled me aside for a heart to heart. He said, “Mette, I know you’re discouraged, but I want you to know that you are a good swimmer. You just haven’t met a long enough distance yet. You’re going to find it, possibly in college, possibly not. It might me the full mile or it might be longer.”

I told him thanks and went on my way. I didn’t try out for the college swim team. I swam for exercise for two more decades until I got into triathlon. And that was when I realized this coach, who had watched we workout for three years, had known something about me that I hadn’t, that I’d dismissed. He was right. I hadn’t met a long enough distance. I suspect now that the right distance for me is about 5 hours, half Ironman distance.

I was thinking about this recently, watching marathon runners succeed, and thinking to myself that the reason you get to marathon is because you fail at all the shorter distances and your coaches tell you that you’re talented and to keep trying, and they push you to longer and longer distances. Until you find the right one. Through a lot of failures and continuing to believe in yourself.

And I also think this has a lot to do with my creative career, where I failed at a lot of different genres until I found the right one. When I first started writing, I was going to do *literature* because I’d studied the “classics” in German and English in my classes in college and graduate school. I had very high ideals. My first novel (you won’t find it anywhere, thank God!) was called The Shepherdess’ Daughter and was about a teenager girl who was living with her grandmother after her mother went crazy. There were a lot of journals and letters written about why everyone had come to the place that they were. Patriarchy, sexism, feminine madness—all the stuff of great literature, right?

It didn’t sell, though some friends read it and said it was great (never trust friends reading your manuscripts, writer peeps!). I went from there to an attempt at hard science fiction, because that was what my husband at the time thought was “worthy” literature. Yeah, that didn’t go well, either. It was when I tried my hand at genre fiction that I started to see traction in responses from editors and awards in contests. My first published book was The Monster In Me, not coincidentally with a Mormon foster family, set in Heber, Utah. Most of the rest of the published books in my young adult writing career were fantasy, which I kind of stumbled into and discovered that people who read it loved and told me I had a “knack” for writing well.

Later, I moved to writing adult mystery novels, because I’d always been a mystery fan, devoured Sherlock Holmes as a kid, and had been reading it in on the side (Agatha Christie, Anne Perry, Robert Parker) for years for fun. What if I wrote what was fun instead of what was “literature”/ What if I did what was effortless easy for me? What if I wrote about the world that I knew intimately well, Mormonism?

What if we humans spend our lives trying things out and finding out that we are very, very good at certain things and not at others? We could bang our heads against the wall and do the hard things, or we could do the easy things. We could let ourselves succeed. We could listen to people around us who are telling us what we’re already succeeding at, after all the failures that got us there. I continue to do things I’m not particularly good at. It’s important to have things that you aren’t doing as a competition or even to share with other people, or at least it is for me. But there’s no reason that you have to follow failure. Your life is not that way, love.