There’s a big difference between feeling like I did some things that were failures versus feeling that I myself am a failure. Rationally, I know I’m dealing with the former, but emotionally it feels much more like the latter. ​ Transitioning and moving to a new country weren’t career progress, but in retrospect they were necessary for me to get in a place where I could focus on my career again. ​ For me right now, that means figuring out how to be okay with things not feeling “Done”, and looking for ways to celebrate the progress I’ve made even when that isn’t wrapped up in easy-to-cupcake achievements. ​ and isolation is not good for burnout. ​ Focusing so much on discrete, publicly visible accomplishments made it harder for me to see the small, gradual pieces of progress that matter more to me at this point in my career – and life. I started the cupcakes as a way to demonstrate what it meant to celebrate my successes, and I hope that sharing this will help other people see what it might look like to sit with and learn from failures as well.

I was teaching writing all day but not writing myself, and on twitter so many people I knew were starting tinyletters, sending small paragraphs of heart-rending, un-pitch-able prose, family stories and recipes and album recommendations and lowkey erotica in little forward-marching scrolls of text that I’d read curled around my phone late at night while I couldn’t sleep. I was jealous of my students and I was jealous of everyone starting tinyletters and of everyone publishing essays, and of the world going on one bright achievement after another all around me. I wrote some paragraphs quickly, without looking, like muttering under my breath, told myself I didn’t have to edit it because no one would read it anyway, and hit send. The whole college application is a murderously hopeful document, and hope is the most mercenary emotion, the struck-match trick of salespeople and con artists and politicians, leaving the door unlocked at night, risking everything in a game to which no one told us the rules.