On a day celebrating winning the right to form a new country, I want to talk about failing.

I think it’s fair to say that no one sets out to fail, and therefore no one finds it particularly easy to fail.  When you have dedicated time and effort and emotional energy toward a project, no one wants to hit a gatekeeper — actual (like an employer saying you’re not right for the job) or intangible (like [cough] an embryo refusing to burrow in deep).

It’s also fair to say that some people are better at rolling with the punches.  They switch to Plan B and are equally happy with the new path.  Or they close the door on an idea and don’t look back.  They take a day or two to cry, and then let it go.  Or they double down and continue to bang against the same gate, assuming that at some point it will open with enough sustained force.

The New York Times recently covered an initiative at Smith College called Failing Well.  People are speaking openly about their most spectacular fails, even projecting them on campus screens, and in doing so, are trying to get people more comfortable with the idea that they won’t always see their best efforts rewarded; their best ideas embraced.

The New York Times writes,

“What we’re trying to teach is that failure is not a bug of learning, it’s the feature,” said Rachel Simmons, a leadership development specialist in Smith’s Wurtele Center for Work and Life and a kind of unofficial “failure czar” on campus. “It’s not something that should be locked out of the learning experience. For many of our students — those who have had to be almost perfect to get accepted into a school like Smith — failure can be an unfamiliar experience. So when it happens, it can be crippling.”

When they talk about crippling failure, they’re not talking about people failing classes or getting rejected from graduate school.  They’re talking about the small failures of everyday life: failed relationships and club rejections and disliked room assignments.  I guess the school’s belief (and they’re not the only college participating in resilience training) is that if students can’t roll with the small stuff, how will they roll with the large stuff?

But maybe the answer is that there is no way to prepare yourself for the large stuff.  That you can only prepare yourself for the small stuff and then muddle through the large stuff when it comes your way.  I’m just thinking about infertility; nothing could have prepared me for getting through that with grace.

To expect a person to get through it with grace is too much pressure.  Now I’m not only dealing with the failure itself but being a failure at failing?  So, yes, I think resilience is wonderful.  Being able to problem solve and dream up Plan Bs is wonderful.  Accepting that you need to get through the suck and that things will hopefully be different in the future is wonderful.  But expectations beyond that feel too heavy because they feel tied to personality.  Some people embrace change and others run from it screaming.  All of that has to be taken into account, too.

Anyway, I thought the initiative was interesting as was the coverage of it and the questions asked in the article.  What are your thoughts?

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Our town set off their fireworks over the weekend.  Why do we set off fireworks to mark the day?  Aren’t the fireworks supposed to be recreating the noise and intensity of battle without the danger?  Clearly the people who fought in the war are long gone, but this seems counter to the spirit of the day.

If we’re celebrating the fact that there is an aftermath to the war — that it’s over — shouldn’t we be marking the day with something calm?  Gentle music and back rubs?  I like watching fireworks, but upon reflection, it seems like a strange way to mark the day.

Are you doing anything for July 4th if you live in the US?  I’m assuming for everyone else that the day is just Tuesday.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

I read about something interesting in a recent Clover newsletter, but I haven’t been able to find this information anywhere else online.  So I’m turning to you, Instagram users, to tell me if it’s true, and everyone else to ask what you think.

So Clover states about Instagram:

The platform—which is no stranger to hate speech—created a tool that uses AI to flag abuse. It’ll remove mean comments without notifying the trolls themselves (so the content will still show on their feed, but nobody else’s). The goal is to “foster kind, inclusive communities.”

I am a very inactive Instagram user. I have never posted a picture, and I only follow my niece, sister, and sister-in-law.  (You never miss a post if you only follow three people!)  So I’ve never seen hate comments on Instagram.  Everywhere else on the Internet, yes, but I’m on Instagram infrequently and have never received a comment since I have posted zero images.

So… is this true?  Clover makes it sound like flagging abuse (or AI flagging abuse) will stop the comment from showing up in anyone else’s feed, but the troll will have no idea.  They’ll think their comments are still hanging around, but no one will actually be seeing them.

And if it is true… I don’t know.  I mean, I could see this helpful in the case of certain individuals who are purposefully trying to press buttons.  But in the case of people who say one bone-headed thing?  How will they learn what not to say if no one actually calls them on it?  Plus, it sounds like a really cowardly way of dealing with hate speech.  Clover is stating that Instagram is going to pretend the content is still up but SURPRISE it’s actually not posted anywhere but the troll’s feed?

And, moreover, what may be a horrible comment to one person may not be a horrible comment to someone else.  There is a big difference between Clover’s “mean comment” and actual hate speech or threats (direct or indirect).  Someone could leave a comment on this post stating, “this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever read!” (And I’m sure someone will now do that because I’ve written that example.)  That is a mean comment.  According to Clover, if someone left a comment like that on Instagram, I could flag it (or an AI could flag it) and no one would be able to see it except the person who left the comment.  And the person would never know and would be ten times more likely to do it again in the future.

Not really sure how I feel about this feature if it exists, or if Clover got it totally wrong.

I’ve been trying to convince the kids that when adults get together, we like to put on a record and dance in the middle of the living room, mostly doing the robot.  The reason they have never witnessed this is that adults would never engage in this behaviour if there were children around.  But yes, the moment they are out of the house, or when I go over to another person’s house, we’re dancing in the living room.  Or the kitchen.  I mean, we aren’t picky.  We’ll just all gather in a group and do the robot for hours at a time.  And then laugh and laugh and laugh.

Do you realize how much brain power I use trying to annoy the twins?

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Battlefish is back with a post after a long winter.  She talks about the depression that caused her absence: “It wasn’t like this every single day, but most days (even now still to some extent) I was able to get by without thinking about anything and it would be an okay day. And then there were days it would just all crash in on me.”  It made me smile when I saw a post pop up in my rss reader, and reading it felt like a fragile thaw.  Like a corner has been turned, or, at least, someone has peeked their head around.

No Kidding in NZ tells readers to stop apologizing for the fact that they don’t have children.  She points out, “But our existence is not offensive, our No Kidding lives are not discourteous to any others, and therefore having increased visibility as people without children – talking about the fact we have no children, whether in a casual one-line comment, or in response to others, whether correcting assumptions, or by refusing to justify our lives or respond to invasive questions – is not impolite either.”  I love the ending, and if we were in a movie, I would have been standing up and cheering while she walked by in slow motion.

Infertility Honesty has a post about coming out of the grieving stage and moving into the overlapping rebuilding stage.  She is simultaneously dealing with a nervous system disorder, but she writes, “My mind then did something it has rarely been able to do for the past seven years, it skipped around the meadow of possible endings and transitions.”  And I love this: “My losses and experiences will always be a part of me, in need of being tended to and integrated into my life, but perhaps there does come a time when the foundation is built, the legwork not so extensive.”  It’s a gorgeous post.

Res Cogitatae has a moving post about visiting a beach for the first time since her father’s accident that left him paralyzed.  But it’s really about what we carry with us due to our life experiences, the unique struggles we each have based on what we know first hand.  She writes, “One day my children will not want to swim in the rock pool. They will want to dive into the waves, just like their father, just like I once did. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do it again.”

Lastly, Jewish IVF has a post about how she feels differently about things this week.  It’s not one thing, but it’s several things all coming together; feeling like she’s taking care of items on her to-do list, setting and respecting her own boundaries, pushing herself to join with things.  She tries to explain her feelings at a baby naming ceremony: “It was beautiful and I felt overwhelmed but not so much that I had to run out. Or cry. It was encouraging rather than not. I’m not sure I can explain it.”  I think it’s encouraging because you realize that you’ve gotten through something. That you endured.  And that’s not a small thing.

The roundup to the Roundup: Bothering the twins.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between June 23rd and 30th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

You know that fable type in which the animal is trying to figure out their purpose in the community and by the end of the story, they’ve learned that their purpose is not X, Y, or Z.  Their purpose is W, and now that they know that, they’re at peace because they’ve found their place in life.

(And usually this involves a job like being the fiddle player for all the other mice, and no one wonders how mice have gotten their hands on a mini fiddle to find this out.)

I think my purpose is to always be there.  There is defined by however you know me.  So if you know me through this blog, my role is to always write this blog.  If you know me through my workplace, my role is to keep doing my job there.  If you know me through our coding club, my role is to keep attending the coding club.

I am terrible at so many things, but I am excellent at sticking around.  I do everything I do for a long period of time.

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I’ve heard this a lot throughout my life.  People go and when they come back, they comment, “Oh!  You’re still here.”

For instance, I was a camp counselor at the same camp year after year after year.  People would be my camper.  They would leave.  They would return years later as a counselor and say, “Oh!  You’re still here.”

I hear that with the blog a lot.  A person participates in the community, writing and reading blogs.  They stop writing and reading for a few years.  Something moves them to return to writing their blog, and they poke around to see if people they know are still writing because the blogging landscape looks so different.  They find me and state, “Oh!  You’re still here.”

I was thinking about this because variations of that comment came up a few times on the 11th blogoversary post.  It seems like such a low bar to clear: Show up.  Keep doing the thing you’re doing.  Don’t change.

But reading those comments changed my mind about my steadfastness.  Maybe my purpose is to just show up.  To be a constant.  To still be doing something, an anchor in an ever-changing world.

It’s not a bad role.  At least, it’s not worse than a mouse with a fiddle.

Do you change a lot, or are you usually doing the same thing in the same place year after year after year?