I keep trying to do other items on The List, but they all keep bringing me back here: my fear of failing.
I don’t think I’m the only person who experiences a fear of failure. I’d actually be surprised if most people haven’t experienced this fear at some point in their lives. But most people don’t have a public relationship with failing, and most people can overcome this fear in private or avoid it altogether.
I have had a very public relationship with failing. I have failed to fund several consortiums, I have failed to collaborate effectively with ensembles and performers, I have failed to meet deadlines, I have failed to communicate with commissioners, and almost every application I have made in the last five years has been a failure.
My experience of failure is a not the typical experience of failure and that scares the shit out of me. For every success I have, I have a hundred failures. Or more. Probably more.
And… There is nothing stopping me from writing music more than my fear of failure. Let me explain.
I’m really, really good at self-sabotage.
Whenever I’m writing music, I can’t help but say things to myself like “ that seems kinda basic for Kincaid Rabb” or “ you missed a parallel fifth, dumbass.” I’m really good at negative self-talk when I’m working on anything. Nothing is ever good enough. When nothing is ever good enough, everything is a failure.
And for what? What does “ this is basic for Kincaid Rabb” even mean? That’s not a bad thing. Being honest, I think my music could probably benefit from being less complicated. And some of the most successful music of the last 20 years is entirely built on parallel fifths. Most of that music is at least decent. These things that I am using upon myself as negative self-talk are not failures, and yet my instinct is to perceive them as hundreds of tiny little failures that leave me creatively paralyzed, so afraid to fail that I can no longer write.
I’m fascinated by my own brain’s capacity to spin everything into death by a thousand paper cuts. It’s not fair to me. It’s not okay that I do this to myself. I like to think that I’m not alone in having this problem, but there has to be way for people like me to recover from the terror of failure. The best that I have been able to come up with is to take a breath when a self-sabotaging thought occurs, take a moment to unpack it, acknowledge the failure and the fear that envelops it (often out loud), then keep moving forward, hopefully having let go of the idea that it was a failure at all. I’d like to be more successful at moving through what I perceive as failure in that way. I have not always been successful at rationalizing these fears and the failures that inspired them.
But it’s not just the little things. Sometimes, it’s scrapping entire projects that I’m afraid won’t work.
As a composer, I tend to put myself in high-risk, high-reward situations.
At the beginning of my post-college career, I did a series of consortiums: Wishful Thinking, Switchback Daredevils, The Automaton and the Aeronaut, Exploring Infinities, The Many Adventures of Mr. Maverick, Diamondback Darlene, and Crystal Depths. These were the successful consortiums that actually resulted in works. But I have come up with a dozen or more ideas for consortiums beyond those that felt wrong or impossible that I cancelled because I was afraid that they would fail.
The funny thing about cancelling those consortiums? By cancelling them, I made sure they failed. I was so afraid of failing to fund the consortiums for those works that I made sure they failed on my terms. And it was during a period it which I was killing myself with The Hustle, so I never gave myself time to process the failures I hoisted upon myself and learn from them. I just internalized the failed consortiums and all the regret that came with them and moved on to the next thing without giving myself the space I needed for healing.
I think part of me didn’t want anyone else to be to blame for the failures. I tend to be trusting person, but I have also watched that trust get broken and promises made get broken and been burned by my own trusting nature. I hate feeling like I failed because someone I trusted failed.
It’s not just consortiums. I have the unfortunate habit of overcomplicating in projects, imagining that my work needs to be a comprehensive, all-encompassing masterpiece with the highest degree of detail and something that appeals to everyone. Each piece I write is a theme park ride, like Pirates of the Caribbean or The Haunted Mansion, failing to recognize that theme park attractions have teams of hundreds of people working on them at one time. I am one composer who cannot continue to be responsible for creating perfect works that capture the imagination over and over again. I can’t hold myself to this standard anymore and fear failure like I do. I can’t hold myself to impossible standard anymore that I have failed to deliver before and will probably fail to deliver again.
I can only do my best. And I have to be able to accept that sometimes my best will fail. Even better, I need it to be okay if I don’t do my best. I need to be able to try new things without worrying whether or not they will fail. I need to give myself the space to experiment.
My fear of failure was most pronounced during the composition, rehearsal, and performance of Three Aviaries for Oboe, English Horn, Narrator, and String Quartet. I remember being absolutely terrified of performing what I had written in the weeks leading up to it, constantly seeking out advice and guidance from other composers to assuage the idea that it could fail. I was terrified that audiences wouldn’t get it, and that people would reject it and that I would walk away a complete failure. I remember bursting into tears during its first rehearsal because it worked. I’m crying writing this because that place I went to write that was so stressful and fearful that I was emotionally compromised for most of IDRS 2022.
The worst part? I’d do it again. I’d do it all over again just for the feeling of what it was like when it didn’t fail.
There’s got to be a healthier way of succeeding.
A lot of advice about failing doesn’t work on me anymore. The suggestion that everyone fails is not comforting. Just because something is normalized doesn’t mean the emotional weight of the thing is lessened. The idea of another opportunity being out there for me also the idea that I could fail at that too. And the suggestion that the best thing to do is to keep putting myself in a position in which I am subject to someone else telling me I failed does nothing for the emotional energy it took me to fail in the first place.
Over the last few years, I have had to tell myself often that someone else’s success is not my failure. This has helped me a lot with being able to be happy for people who got opportunities when I didn’t and to celebrate my community’s successes. But it has done nothing for my own self-image or to increase my capacity to respect myself.
So I’m reframing it: My failure does not mean success is impossible.
I don’t know how to fix this. I really don’t think it’s realistic to expect that I can overcome a fear of failure in one fell swoop, but that the only way of dismantling it is with incremental growth. That means there’s a lot more where this came from. There’s like ten items of The List that deal with my fear of failure.
But first… I need to accept that my fear of failure and the way I have allowed it to shape my creative practice is a problem.