Piggybacking on Sunday’s post about presenting the whole picture and not just the highlights reel, Lifehacker had an interesting idea a few weeks ago about creating a failure resume.  So think the opposite of your actual resume.  It’s a document that catalogues all the times you’ve failed.

But there’s a point!

By doing this exercise, you stop telling yourself a messed up version of life where you pretend everything came to you easily.  Instead, you remember how far you’ve come and the times where you’ve had to navigate a difficult path to emerge out the other side.

I was trying to think about how I would arrange my failure resume, similar to the way people highlight different aspects of their experience depending on their job.  My chemical pregnancies and preterm labour should probably go toward the bottom of the document at this point, similar to the way I tuck my degrees towards the bottom of my resume.

I guess I would start with not getting into my first choice college.  That sucked.  I remember crying so hard that I couldn’t breathe, and my friend, Matt, taking me out to see My Own Private Idaho for the sixth time as a condolence prize.  I was miserable about this fact until October of my freshman year of college when I decided that it was okay that I wasn’t where I wanted to be, and I was going to be happy where I was.  I had a fantastic four years, and zero regrets in retrospect, though… at the time… it sucked.

And I would currently end with all the agent rejections followed by the publisher rejections that I’ve collected over the years.  Connecting with my current agent took a lot of time and a lot of “no, thank you,” emails from other agencies.  And then landing all of my publishing contracts also came with a heaping dose of “not for me.”  It wouldn’t be that hard to crawl back through my email folders and start listing all the names and places as a reminder.

I really love this line from the article: “The notion that any person can achieve meaningful success without experiencing setbacks and disappointments seems hopelessly naïve.”  Have I learned from all of my mistakes?  No.  There have been plenty of setbacks that haven’t taught me anything about myself or how to navigate life.  But there are plenty that should be listed, if only to remind myself that sometimes shit happens, and sometimes we even get through it.

What do you think of making a failure resume?

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

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It’s the 29th anniversary of my Bat Mitzvah this week.  I commented on it aloud at dinner only because the date sticks in my mind.  The Wolvog cocked an eyebrow and said, “Do you really still celebrate that still?  I mean, now that you’re really old?”

Ouch.

But it made me think about the anniversaries I mark and the ones I don’t.  We used to celebrate our dating anniversary and our engagement anniversary, but now we just mark the wedding anniversary, and do it as low-key as possible, at that.  I mark my birthday, but I used to do my half-birthday, too.  I used to mark loss dates.  The day the twins came home from the NICU.  But all those things have faded over the years.

What anniversaries do you still mark?  Which ones have you let slip away?

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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 posts.

Thank you for all the kind words about the new book.  I am really proud of it.  If I was flippant when people offered compliments, it was only because my insider view of my life doesn’t sound like it matches the outsider view of my life.

When we only talk about accomplishments, you get a skewed view of who I am.  So, yes, I did work really hard on the book, but…

I dread writing pretty much on a daily basis.  I will put off actually getting down to work as long as possible, filing emails or reading blog posts, because writing is hard and I’m not really a fan of hard things.  The only thing that gets me working is a fear of running out of time in the workday and a healthy dose of berating myself.

On that note, I didn’t finish my PhD.  And I threw out all of my research about 13 years ago.  So it will never happen, and I’m okay with that.

I can’t tie my shoes.  I not only never mastered it as a kid, but I still can’t figure it out as an adult.  Even when the twins patiently sit with me and try to teach me.  When I need to tied a pair of shoes, I do so slowly, with bunny ears.  Most of the time, I slip my untied laces into my shoes and walk around with untied shoes.

I lie about how many popsicles I eat and hide the sticks in the bottom of the trash can.  I know in admitting this that Josh now knows, but I will continue to hide the sticks because I’m ashamed of my junk food jags.

I am a horrible flyer.  I pretty much plan my life around trying to get out of flying.

I think we’ve also established that I suck at getting and staying pregnant.  I also suck at carrying children to term.

Besides the popsicle consumption, there is nothing on this list that the people in my life don’t already know.  And that’s sort of the point.  We should have these healthy, well-rounded versions of our accomplishments and foibles.  But so many people only see the really good stuff online.  It’s up to us to balance it out.  Not to put ourselves down, but to present something closer to reality.

Care to admit anything?

It was a week of bad news — not for me but for good friends — and it kept coming day after day.  Bad medical results.  A funeral.  A gloominess hung over the week, punctuated only by more grey rain.  I felt numb, maybe because our friends are too close so their news is too big to wrap my brain around easily.

Still, it was bizarre to find myself crying as I scrolled through Facebook because I read that a local clown had died.

Ken-zo the clown owned a bar in Baltimore that we visited a few years ago.  It had a two drink minimum before the magic show, and I had my drinks quickly to get them over with because I don’t like alcohol.  I ended up getting too drunk to read the book I brought with me, so I talked to Ken about magic.  I just wanted to learn a few magic tricks, something I could master with my complete lack of coordination and my inability to carry through practicing hand movements for hours at a time.  He humoured me and told me about various tricks that I could pick up on my own.  I still have the list I wrote down before the show.

I couldn’t put into words why I fell apart with that story and not the ones that happened to people whom I care about a lot.  Maybe it was the realization that we’ll all be gone someday.  That one day someone else will be telling a story about a conversation they had with me, and they’ll muse how odd it is that I once was here and now I’m gone.  Or maybe it had just been such a fun night, and this person who had built a space that made me so giddy with magic (liquor notwithstanding) was now gone.

It says something when you can quickly recognize a face you only saw once as you scroll past it on Facebook.  It was that memorable a night.

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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:

• “Plans in Pencil” (Family Building with a Twist)
• “This is Motherhood, Too” (Still Mothers)
• “Leading Up to THE Appointment (Part One)” (No Good Eggs)
• “Making a Transfer Plan (Part Two)” (No Good Eggs)
• “Other Options and Donor Stuff (Part Three)” (No Good Eggs)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Raven Rambling has a belated Mother’s Day post.  It took her some time to put her thoughts into words.  After years of being asked when she would have children, she realized this year that not only was no one asking her questions about family building, but they were pretending that her dogs were her children.  She explains, “This Mother’s Day, which had been intended to make me feel included, made me feel more alone than any other Mother’s Day before it.”  It’s a wonderful post about belonging.

Hope Floats Among the Cherry Blossoms has a post about something I think many of us has experienced — being the last person in a group without a child.  Her online forum group is still in touch, and she tries not to talk about how she feels about this with them.  “I edited it out because I did not want to hurt anyone’s feelings or push them away. But, the distance continued to expand either way.”  It’s a post about not knowing where her journey will go, but realizing that different people come into your life at different times.

Lastly, My Perfect Breakdown has a post about her child picking up her husband’s mannerisms.  She writes: “When we chose to adopt we knew we’d never see any of our physical attributes in our child … But, regardless of what our child looks like, what I didn’t really think about is that our child is bound to pick up on our mannerisms because children learn through mimicking.”  It’s an interesting discussion of nature vs. nurture.

The roundup to the Roundup: Crying about a stranger.  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 May 13th and 20th) 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.

My box of author copies still hasn’t arrived, but my friend, Chris swung by a bookstore and snapped a picture of my new book on the shelf.

I thought about swinging by a bookstore myself, but it has been continuously raining.  I know that’s a bad excuse.  I guess I’ve been waiting for my copies.  I guess I want to hold it for the first time at home.

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Before I wrote my first book, I thought that holding your book would be the most exhilarating experience in the world, like that first kiss with Josh when every hope got funneled into a single, perfect moment.  But it’s a lot messier than that.  No matter how many times it happens, it feels the same.

There’s relief: You’ve done it.  The project has been completed and there is tangible proof.  It was a slog, filled with ups and downs, but no one can take away the fact that you have physical evidence of a job well done.  There’s sadness: It was such a huge part of your life for months or years, and now it’s over.  There’s anxiety: Now I need to tell people about this project and ask them to support it.  There’s worry: Fuck.  What if it isn’t good enough?  There’s pride: I accomplished this!  There’s embarrassment: What if no one likes it, and I look like an idiot?  There’s calm: Being in my hands means that it’s completely out of my hands now.

It’s all of that, rolled into a single moment.  So not really like the kiss at all.

I hope you like it.  This particular book was a labour of love; a book that almost didn’t happen, that means so much to me on so many different levels.  I feel like I’ve been on a roller coaster for the last year and a half, and I’m finally getting off the ride and looking back at it, thinking how happy I am that I got to be at the amusement park at all.  That I was brave enough to stick with the ride even when it started rocking on its tracks.  That I’m sad the ride is over, and, at the same time, happy to keep exploring what else is at the park.  A year and a half is a long time to be on a ride.

But it was a great ride.

It’s at bookstores, but if you don’t want to leave the house (as I often don’t):

• Amazon
• Kindle
• Barnes and Noble
• Nook
• Que

Thank you for being there the last year and a half while I mashed this out.  It is everything I know about fiction writing, between two covers.