I've recently finished reading Brandon Sanderson's latest novel, Wind and Truth, which I have, on the whole, really enjoyed. Though there's a lot about the book to recommend, what stuck with me in particular was Jasnah's arc. Through the book we see Jasnah negotiating for the fate of a city with an entity much more powerful than her. She fights and argues valiantly, but up against a near-omniscient deity, she is overmatched. Her moral philosophy is shown to be comprehensively flawed, she's made out to be a hypocrite and, in the end, she loses the city. Her arc ends with her beaten down, defeated, wrong and only wanting someone to hold. And honestly, I can relate.

Between the pain and loss in my personal life of watching someone I love slowly die, the regular, incessant attacks on the very existence of trans people that have been landing like clockwork and the sheer weight of starting one's own consultancy, I find myself completely overmatched. I'm beaten down, broken, unable to work effectively, unable to even speak much of the time. I fought well and worked hard, but in the end, I have to face facts: the enemy has temporarily won. I can't do what I wanted to do.

I wanted to fight to protect those that I care about, but I think I'm out of energy to do that. I wished to help my client build a good data warehouse: I have only a fraction of the mental power that I need to do that. I want to write: this article has been delayed by almost a full week. The only thing that I seem capable of at the moment is sitting in my room and playing video games. My values and way of looking at the world appear to be full of holes and failing to make the world better. I'm sitting here alone, in pain and without a candle in the dark.

More than failure in the sense we use it in the business world, this is failure in the engineering sense: a structure that's been put under too much strain and that eventually just gives out. And just like in the engineering world, the stronger the person is, the more dramatic the failure becomes. People who fail quickly, those that give up and stop fighting, fail in small ways: ways that accumulate over time, certainly, in the same way that plastic breaking repeatedly eventually pollutes the world and gets microplastics into everything. But those that keep fighting against the odds until they can't any more... well, that's a lot more like a bridge collapse. It's messy, it's ugly and it hurts people in a much more dramatic way than the small failures.

And ultimately, I think this is an outcome that almost everyone who genuinely cares about something will find themselves in eventually. Being human and fallible while having beliefs means that your values, whatever they are, will sometimes break and fail you. You can't always be smart enough, strong enough, or work hard enough. You will fail, you will collapse, you will be-not-enough. This is what it is to be human. The worst of it is that this is still the right option, because the only way to avoid this is not to care about anything, compromising or failing immediately, and that leads to multiple small failures that cause corruption, stagnation and seep into and poison everything. We have to stand strong and keep going, knowing that we will eventually fail and hurt people: a heavy burden to carry.

But of course, the world doesn't have much time or space for this kind of messy collapse, does it? Breaking messily means, in the eyes of the world, that you're defective and need to be thrown out. Whether it's at work, in progressive politics or wherever else you might find yourself putting your effort, the cardinal rule is not to break. And this, in the end, means that we throw out the best of us when we break, leaving us to scrape together and heal on the margins. Meanwhile, those who succeed are those who break little and often, but who don't appear to fail. They slowly, imperceptibly fail over and over, gradually poisoning spaces until they're full of rubbish and nothing can productively get done, while those who might be able to do something are trapped, unable to access resources or authority by the relentless glare of perfectionism.

We talk so much about celebrating failure, and yet that isn't the same thing. We celebrate people (in business or otherwise) who fuck something up, learn nothing and then proceed to go make exactly the same mistake somewhere else. We praise activists who learn not to be racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic, but who don't do a jot to change how they think and wind up turning exactly the same structure of bigotry on an acceptable target. We have no time for those who stand in the ruins of everything they've tried to build, weeping, and try to build something up again. We have no time for those who've learned troubling things about their own ideologies and wish to change them to better reflect what they care about. We care nothing for those who've had to radically change their values to feel OK with who they are. This isn't celebrating failure: it's play-acting at it. And we shouldn't celebrate this kind of failure either: it's a deeply, deeply painful thing. What we need to do is be there when people and their ways of looking at the world fail. We need to be able to sit there in the darkness and keep people company, and, when the person is ready, help them back out.

A large part of my most recent break was the sheer strain placed on me by the need to not look like I was failing. We are after all expected to be professional in the business world, and this means being put together and gathered. I don't think that's something I can manage: I can't pretend to be OK while drowning in the work of care for the dying and in the midst of a vicious campaign of persecution against my friends and I. But how can I say what needs to be said? How can I go into work and say with a straight face that I'm having difficulty because I'm terrified that my friends are going to lose the healthcare that they so desperately need? How can I face the fact that if I did that, I'd likely be met with blank, incurious faces and the a priori assumption that I'm just being dramatic? How do I face the fact that, to make the money to keep myself alive, I need to exist in an environment that denies that anything about me or my life could possibly hurt that much? This is a deeply unfair thing to put on anyone, and we really, really need to stop doing it to people.

Exceedingly dark times are coming for us, and those whose primary goal is infallibility are already bowing the knee in advance, terrified of any negative judgement. If we're ever going to get out if this mess, it's us broken, beaten ones who are going to have to do it. We'll have to work together, listen to each other and eventually stand up again.