Conquering Failure

Dawn Stergin
6 min readJan 6, 2020

When you take a Leap of Faith and Miss the Landing

Photo by Sammie Vasquez on Unsplash

“Go for it!”

“You got this!”

“You only live once.”

We hear inspiring stories from friends and media about people who take a great leap of faith and start something new and amazing or achieve an astonishing goal. These courageous people sometimes face and overcome great fear and doubt before reaching and succeeding.

But what about when we miss and fall on our faces?

The company we started fails and we are broke. The relationship we pursued tanks. The move to another country leaves us lonely, disappointed and lost. We have tried and tried, but we just can’t do it.

Life is full of missteps and losses. We studied for that test but still bombed it. We thought he was “the one” but he didn’t think so. We were sure we would get the job but were passed over. Most of us learn to handle these disappointments. However, there are times in the lives of the brave when we put our WHOLE selves into something paramount we believe is worthwhile; something we have always wanted or thought about doing and we crash and burn.

I’m a petite 5'1". I was always the smallest or next-to-smallest in my class growing up. A phrase I learned to use to cope with teasing was, “The bigger they are, the harder they…

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Dawn Stergin

Former addictions counselor, empty-nester, activist, animal lover, writer and lover of what it means to be human.