Dear You,
A little big Thank You to let you know how much your support has meant to BEDA and our little team (Rachel, Alia & Liz). This time last year, we had only just finished trialing Project Radiance and now we have both Radiance Soft Crème and theVitamin Lip Serum. Living up to our promises is absolutely vital to our brand ethos and to you, our community. Making promises to myself however is a whole different story. If like me you are curious yet deafeningly self-critical, then it can be a minefield to navigate.
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The Art of Failing
(spoiler: it's a fallacy)
I used to believe I was a master of the Art of Failing.
My TCM acupuncturist (aka my casual therapist), concerned that my body was in survival mode as she felt my pulse, asked gently, “Are you afraid of failure?” I replied almost immediately, “Not at all. I love capital F - Failing”.
In fact, I can’t wait to fail, I crave failure, I yearn for an explosive failure. Then I can really give myself the space to retreat & reset and have the perfect excuse to shut out everyone’s requests & expectations. Free from all obligations.
Anytime I've had a major life setback (and I've had a few in my almost 4 decades of earthly living), I secretly experience an almost euphoric excitement. I’ve had many friends say “hey that’s so healthy, you’re so brave”, to which I could intellectually agree but not necessarily feel emotionally. The truth and the fallacy here is that it just means I have a very strong tendency to wait for total rock bottom before I give myself permission to "do what I want to do". And by doing so, I have the “success” of mastering the Art of Failure, when in truth, I have only succeeded in punishing myself and operating beyond my mind & body’s means. Think of it in terms of money, the foundational principle of living below your means, I’ve done the opposite for my mental & physical health.
"I wanna be sedated"
In the same vein, I have always found humour in my delight of going under sedation or becoming so severely ill that I have to be knocked out on medication.
Whenever doctors prep me for sedation, explaining step by step, I always interrupt and say “just shoot me up Doc, I don’t care”. I absolutely love the extreme feeling of enforced sleep (be it sedation or meds, I prefer sedation), it commands my anxious left brain to shut the hell up and as a bonus, when I wake up, I am weak and I am all for it. Because when I’m weak, no one can ask anything of me and it is simply heaven on earth. I am finally free. Or am I?
If I examine my love for both sedation and failure, it exposes to me the truth: I am simply not in alignment with my core. If, like me, you were brought up to be a “good girl”, (especially in Asian societies), the most basic tenet is to be selfless, to prioritise the comfort and pleasure of others above your own. Not so cute anymore, is it? This is not to say I believe in zero consideration of others, of course I do, just not at the expense of ourselves.
When I am not aligned with who I am, I am giving away too much and desiring things that I don’t truly value. I am giving away time, energy, love and over-valuing external opinions and noise. I know better, I always have, and yet my “good girl” mode overrides my true compass. And so it makes sense that I only allow freedom when I am incapacitated - it’s not “selfish” if I am on my “deathbed”.
I can dissect myself further, be it daddy issues or other trauma, but all of that is irrelevant because it stays in the intellectual realm.
What I want is to feel aligned. To feel present, calmer, happier. I’m not going to list or prescribe “5 steps on how to feel aligned” but I will share with you what I am exploring at the moment to work towards it.
Life is a never ending work-in-progress (thank god for that) and it would be redundant to call it a goal, it’s more a way of living and developing a belief system.
What Do I Really Want to Feel? Inner Peace.
What Do I Value? Wisdom
When I choose to believe in myself (the biggest “love” action of all), I don’t feel as obliged to give my time & energy away.
I used to tell myself, I need to network more, to learn from more people, especially for BEDA, but the last two years of experimentation has shown me that some people are just tourists (and petty thieves) in your life, with plenty of demands and little to zero value-add. There is a difference between true connection and community vs superficial relationships. To be fair, transactional relationships are still a part of life, so it’s important I don’t over-extend in that area.
I also kept getting sick, my body clearly sending me signs. What I am re-discovering is that life & health exponentially improves when we simply stop being over-giving “good girls”. You might say, but Rachel, I could meet someone that can change my life at this event, or I could miss out on an incredible investment opportunity. All can be true, but if we’re desperately expecting something, we are more than likely not to receive it. The universe is hilariously logical, it doesn’t reward expectations, it rewards us when we are true to ourselves.
"When we least expect it."
Don’t we all hate that phrase. So many of us think it means we have to be detached, to be aloof. But it’s really just asking us to be more in tune with ourselves.
Wait, isn’t that brilliant? It’s the perfect excuse/reason to be so quietly obsessed with yourself, to have the wisdom to stay on the path towards inner peace. This was an instant click for me, I don’t need sedation or some life-altering failure to be “free”. My trick is to carry it like a secret (scorpio logic): every decision I make is to further align myself. It doesn’t even matter if the decisions don’t have the desired effects, the universe knows what it’s doing, I’m on my path!
I always tell my (real) therapist, “I am so tired of the universe sending me lesson after lesson”. To which, she gave me a little mantra, “I am going to be better & better”. Simple. Elementary, really. This is not to say you aren’t supposed to feel frustrated or unhappy when bad things happen, as you should. Glass half full? I call bullshit. In fact, this is where a love of failing is useful. Go be fully, terribly sad. Indulge in it, release it, it’s just part of our path towards alignment. It’s all upside from there. Now, how wonderful is that?
Happy New Year Everyone.
With love, Rachel
Footnote* Some books that have shown me my own fallacy and encouraged me to find alignment: “Richer, Wiser, Happier”, “The Midnight Library”, “The Art of Thinking Clearly”. Finally, conversations and time spent with my close friends also bring me the wisdom and humour I seek for a life living in alignment. Inner peace, at last.
BONUS thoughts* I was recently at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and there was an AI video-game art installation by Kihara Tomo. It uses AI-simulated life paths where you select a decision at each life event. At the very end of your “life”, it asks if you would like to “re-live” any one of your choices to alter the outcome or just “quit”, i.e. accept and end the game. I am someone who is never interested in video games, but the premise of “life-choices” was interesting to me. So I played, and by the end of it, I was so tired and did not find the idea of “re-living” tempting at all. To indulge in past decisions for a better outcome is a sunk-cost fallacy, the time and energy spent is already gone, there is no point in continuing investing in them. I am more than happy to cancel a project, which I did with our first Project Radiance. I had invested money and time with a lab, formula trials, and testing with the community, but my instincts told me it was going nowhere. And maybe it could’ve been a fantastic formula, but it was still the right decision to completely scrap it and start from scratch again. Our new Radiance Soft Crème would not be available for you otherwise, and we would not be where we are today.
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