I have always been the person who puts her heart and soul even in the smallest thing asked of me. From school till last week, I have never really faced a major failure. Emotionally I have failed a million times, but for the first time last week I failed as a part of a team in a project at My First Job.

We both gave our interviews on the same day. Our date of joining was also the same. We both had a lot of similar interests, so the bond was beautiful. I learned from her how to use words carefully and that how noticing small things about people can help any bond to grow. It wasn’t only her but in a span of weeks I had met ten team members and learned at least twenty new things which helped me grow as a person individually.

The reason we didn’t get the project wasn’t us. Our work was liked by our clients, they had some other priority work to be done and so they let go of us. We were all given an option to either stay in the company, work in some other team or leave. A few left, others got divided into different teams.

The day our manager told us that the project we all got hired for won’t be coming I kept thinking what better could I have done? What better could we have done as a team? What about our jobs now? What about telling Maa about this? What about managing things at home? I never faced a failure of this sort before. Instead, this was my first failure. I broke.

On my train journey back on the first day we all worked in separate teams there was a flashback from my interview day till the last day we worked as a team. I penned down my learning from each of my team members. After which, my quest for why exactly I felt broken begin.

I realised failure in the sense of losing the project wasn’t the major reason. I feared the changes the failure would bring in which made me cry more. When I got to this reasoning I realised, I have always taken my studies seriously not because I fear to fail but fear the changes a failure would get in my life. And this failure which I faced right on my face this time would bring in the worst kind of changes around me, around my first job atmosphere.

I do not even like to be late for a train, I always reach 10mins before time. I figured why. I fear the change missing a train would cause my timetable that day. I have few times faced this small failures but it didn’t affect me much as it didn’t change much things around me. But this time the change this failure of getting the project would be huge, and hence I felt broken within.

As I sat in the train with my book I tried to dig deeper to find how I can fix this new found problem in me – the fear of changes a failure causes. I closed my eyes for a second, thought for a while. ‘You cannot step into the same river twice’ is what my mind popped up, a quote I had recently read somewhere.

This quote by Heraclitus, a Turkish philosopher, makes it evident that nothing in life is constant. Everything is a phase. Also I believe, for some rhythm in life it is essential it has ups and downs. A person’s life can be judged not on how many things he owns but how many and in what ways he deals with failures.

The latter half of the train journey I penned down how I could deal this failure and the changes it will cause around me. I tried to figure about how I’ll stay in touch with the people in my team, about how I will try my best to do well at the new work expected of me. Facing my first failure made me meet an undercover fear I had. Each failure is learning, is a truth I experienced.