SOURCE - https://brightwanderer.tumblr.com/post/681806049845608448
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I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.
Like... if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you're a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.
The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.
| just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success... I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.
why do you call it "fail" when you mean "end"?
Because I mean fail and trying to frame everything as positive, or at worst, neutral is not healthy and will lead to people not acknowledging their feelings?
There are failures and there are endings. Not being able to cope with a failure is not healthy. Calling everything that ends automatically a failure is not healthy either.
you claim to challenge a paradigm but you merely inverted it. you are still operating under the illusion of good and bad. things end. other things begin. is one thing good if it leads to bad things? is it bad if it leads to good things? or are we just adding our own transient perspective to it? by passing judgment, we're creating good and bad.
this has nothing to do with acknowledging feelings or not. feelings are things too. feelings end. feelings create other things, and those too can lead to other things that we might call good or bad. just because we feel a certain way does not mean the events that led us there are good or bad.
so those "failures" have nothing to do with being real with yourself. it's quite the opposite: you are taking your feelings and attributing them to things in the world.you neglect to recognize them for what they are: transient sensations, that end.