Daniel Chuang
My board drops from my hand and onto the sidewalk with a satisfying thunk. I hop onto it with my new skating shoes, accelerating down an incline. The obstacle is a tall red-painted curb. The challenge is to drop down from the sidewalk and remain upright. I have already bailed out a dozen times.
Hurtling towards my red nemesis, I choke and fall. Again.
Sprawled out on the hot concrete, I hear my skateboard collide against the opposite curb and the sound of my titanium glasses skidding across the ground. No wonder the world looks so blurry. Thankfully, my butt absorbs most of the impact, but I gingerly reach for the back of my head to investigate the source of a sharp pain.
I’ve never been good at falling. I tense up too much, afraid of the impending pain, afraid of the feeling of failure. At thirteen years old, after years of learning piano, I quit because I couldn’t ever get through a song without restarting over a simple mistake. At fifteen years old, I shied away from the math competitions I once enjoyed because I put unreasonable pressure on myself to do well. Last year, working on an essay contemplating free will for a John Locke competition, I threw out my draft after meeting a philosophy student who showed me just how little I knew.
I have a hard time putting forth work that I do not regard as fantastic, which, in turn, inhibits me from creating my most fantastic work.
My mother is good at falling. Not physically – she’s quite unathletic – but she doesn’t fear failure the same way that I do. While I sit and calculate the probabilities of an idea working, she goes out and does it. More often than not, she makes it work—fantastical successes. By comparison, I feel like a foolish caricature of Spock while she’s the dashing Kirk, saving the day for the Chuang family crew.
Rationally, I know this skill isn’t something she possessed at birth—a genetic trait she might have passed down to me. Rather, she failed so many times that she learned how to fail well and courageously.
When I fail, I feel foolish rather than courageous. After getting my skateboard, I started by practicing how to fall into the grass. With each tumble, I felt the questioning, watching eyes of those around me. There was nothing fantastic about that. But with every ungraceful spill, I had to acknowledge failure as part of the learning process.
I strive to become more comfortable with falling, with failing, so that I can grow to become my most fantastic self. It’s ridiculous, really—to feel at most like my mother while standing on top of a popsicle stick with four wheels, determined to get down a measly curb. But the struggle and the pain are invigorating. I feel alive. I pick up my board, walk back to my starting spot, and get ready to fail again.