International Failure Day began in Finland where a National Failure Day has been celebrated on October 13th since 2010.
From Culture Trip here’s an explanation of the reason for this special day:
“The organisers of the Day for Failure argue that making mistakes is a normal and healthy part of life which goes towards success, rather than detracting from it. They invite big names and high achievers to speak on the day and explain the setbacks they have had in their own journeys to success and how they learned from them to provide inspiration to others. Encouraging people to try new or difficult things without worrying about the consequences gives them the confidence to step out of their comfort zone and enjoy an activity. By sharing stories and photos of botched attempts online, they lose their natural fear of criticism.”
Read more about Failure Day here and here.
I’ve shared some of my past failure stories here on the blog, with the aim of making failure a thing that we can talk about. See Fail Again, Fail Better and It’s okay to fail, or let’s make some glorious mistakes in the coming year.
We’ve had guests post about failure as a feminist issue. See Audrey’s The Importance of Trying and Failing (Guest Post), Steph’s “Failure” in lifting, and life (Guest post) and Saba’s Failure, Fitness, and Feminism (Guest Post).
Through the history of the blog we’ve marked our successes (bike rallies ridden! fittest by fifty! Aikido belts awarded! deadlifting 200 lbs!) but I also like to think we’ve made space for acknowledging our setbacks and failures (sports dropped and goals not met). It tells me something that these posts always, inevitably get read more than posts about races successfully completed and fitness events in which we’ve done well. People relate more to the stuff we find hard.
My most recent failure is swimming. I took one on one lessons last fall and I meant to keep it but I didn’t. I won’t give you the excuses. This isn’t the time for that. I set out to learn to swim and to swim regularly but I failed. Don’t worry. I’ll try again. I’m good that way.
How about you? What’s one fitness failure you want to share with the blog? Tell your feminist fitness failure story in the comments.
