Failure

I eliminated failure from of my personal dictionary a very long time ago.

Oddly enough, it was the first time I was accosted by a crack head outside my Aunt Betty’s building on 125th way back in the day. I had always heard my mom and the others talking about who was on “that stuff” now and what they looked like with their skinny necks, uneven gaits and yellowish eyes.

Even as they described this and talked in hushed tones, I was on the verge of telling the entire room that cousin Lina* looked like that, so she must be on “that stuff” too. Fortunately, my 10 year old mind quickly stifled the urge to verbalize that thought, but it did remain in the back of my mind to be confirmed years later when I saw Lina* again.

My cousin J and I went downstairs to play, then get ice pops and candy from a store on the corner. On our way there, a very tall, slim man with skin that looked like caramel rolled in the ashes of firewood shuffled toward us. He wore a two-layer coat that hung haphazardly off one shoulder and a dusty black ski hat in the dog days of summer. I stared askance at his coat and long pants and thought about how glad I was I wore shorts.

We tried to walk wide to avoid him, my older and more street-smart cousin grabbing my hand and pulling me out of his path. To her obvious chagrin, he simply wobbled slightly to change the trajectory of his shuffle. He stopped right in front of us and a lump formed in my throat as he fixed jaundiced eyes on our faces.

“Ya’ll got a dollar? I need me a dollar.”

“Nah, man.” My cousin replied, staring directly into his buttery eyes, “We ain’t got no money.”

I froze as I suddenly felt the weight of the two dollars my mother had given us inside the pocket of my cotton shorts. I never was a good liar and felt with some degree of certainty he would detect the bills in my pocket and seize them. My cousin must have felt me go rigid because she jerked me abruptly forward around the man on “that stuff” and toward the end of the block.

He paused, then eventually decided it wasn’t worth lifting a dollar off two pre-teens that probably didn’t have it anyway.

“Them crack heads betta leave us alone!” she said fiercely as we entered the bodega with the bells on the doors.

What kind of person gets hooked on “that stuff” and wears winter clothes in the summertime? And on top of that, what kind of adult tries to bum a dollar off little kids? A FAILURE, that’s who. It was on that day while enjoying Now n’ Laters and Fruitella that I mentally burned the word “failure” and all its cohorts out of my personal dictionary. “That stuff” also became a non-option.

The tricky part is how to measure success now? Am I living my dream, doing what I was born and tasked to do? How to know is the thing. How do I know?

*- Names changed to protect the ‘users’

UPDATE: I just found this... I don't actually even remember where I got it from but....

As your faith is strengthened you will find that there is no longer the need to have a sense of control, that things will flow as they will, and that you will flow with them, to your great delight and benefit.

Food for Thought.