Volume 11: Is this what failure tastes like?
learning to love the other side of a Hoodsie Cup
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about success and I'm scared it’s only because I feel closer to failure than I ever have. If success begs the question of, “what do I want?” then failure asks, “what am I trying to avoid?” The answer to that was once as simple as chocolate ice cream on splintered wood from the wrong side of a Hoodsie Cup.
Named for the Massachusetts based creamery that produced them, Hoodsie Cups were small, cardboard rounds, filled equally on either side with chocolate and vanilla ice cream. They were served at every birthday party and backyard barbecue in the early aughts, intended as a sort of reconciliation. They presented predilection as one of two things and this appealed to most. So why did I hate them? I think it’s because for as long as I can remember, black-and-white-thinking has pervaded my worldview and has prevented me from being able to hold both things, the good and the bad, in my cup at once. (I can’t blame Hood for this, but also, can’t I?)
The middle of a Hoodsie Cup was the mechanically drawn line between the two flavors. As it were, I’m unwaveringly a vanilla person, always meticulous with that cumbersome, wooden, pseudo-spoon that each ice cream came with, avoiding the chocolate side with every slow, small bite. What the Hoodsie Cup taught me, is that there always seems to exist some boundary to the good that we’re not meant to cross. What exists on the other side “becomes an evil, or evil itself.” For as long as I can remember, everything has seemed to exist on one or the other side of that line.
Morning or night person? Morning. Heaven or hell? We’ll have to see. Coffee or tea? Coffee. Glass-half-full? Surely half-empty. Chocolate or vanilla? Vanilla, clearly.
I recently left my job at the bakery and have since found myself on the other side of things that are good. Yesterday I was a baker in New York. Today I’m back in the place where I’m from, unemployed (“in this economy?!”). The middle was a train ride north from Penn Station which I slept through mostly, as if coasting gently on a raft down the river Styx. The middle is not a place where I know how to linger. But maybe that’s because it feels like a place where hardly anything exists at all. It’s neither this nor that, chocolate nor vanilla, success nor failure. What the middle forces us to do, then, is craft a sense of self out of memory and out of hope. Yesterday, I was a baker, today I’m not, and I can only wish to be something new tomorrow.
The difficulty, I’m finding, is viewing where I am as something other than failure, as something not so definitive. If I’m not a baker, then what am I? How do I craft identity where I am, out of this air that is thin and gray? Telling people I’m unemployed feels like chewing on barbed wire. It seems to cut at a part of me, cut up parts of me, and tell something other than the whole story. I find myself saying things like “I’m unemployed but”. That’s the achilles heel of black and white thinking: it can never paint a picture that is whole. It cuts off the truth somewhere along that mechanically drawn line between chocolate and vanilla.
It didn’t occur to me that I would fail. I suppose that’s another danger of black and white thinking. When things are good, they are all good, and I forget that anything else is possible. But perhaps because of my reluctance to concede, or maybe because as I’ve gotten older, my palate has evolved, I’ve been spending my days trying to unlearn all that the Hoodsie Cup taught me. What if this is all just the middle? Then no wonder I’m trying to wriggle free, to jump to some conclusion. The middle is indubitably, unequivocally the last place I know how to be.
Required Reading:
