I’m a Failure: The Real Reason I Started a Podcast
This episode is the origin story I've never told: going blind, ending up in a wheelchair, and the freedom that comes with nothing left to lose. (Any Janis Joplin fans here?)
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Sophia Chang:
I started a podcast because I'm a loser.
So the longer answer starts at a place that you might generously call rock bottom. What you're about to hear is a story about failure, just once, not just twice, but a pattern of multiple repeated instances of failure. Otherwise known as the story of my life. The good news is it doesn't end there.
When I first started my podcast, it was 2018. I had already gone blind. I went into the hospital later that year and came out in a wheelchair. I had nothing left to lose.
When you're at rock bottom, you have this level of freedom I don't even feel that I have now. But my long history with failure doesn't actually start there. It starts decades earlier.
When I was a tween, I was obsessed with Beck's song Loser. I would write the lyrics in my diary. At the same time, I would sketch out these 20-year plans with my best friends. What dream job we would have, who we would take to the prom — I was going to take Elijah Wood. And so we would be singing these angsty aloof apathetic songs by Gen Xers that we looked up to while simultaneously steeped in millennial idealism for this amazing wealthy life.
We were sure we were going to achieve it. I mean, this is a sure setup for disaster.
The story gets a bit more complex because what followed wasn't exactly failure. It was this in-between, almost-but-not-quite success that was somehow more devastating than straight up failure.
Let's take my Hollywood dreams for example. All I ever wanted as a little girl was to be in a commercial like the kids in the toy ads that I saw during Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. To be on a billboard. To be on a sitcom. And to be in movies.
Every single one of them happened. I was in a commercial that played everywhere all the time during Friends, during Everwood, which I love. I was on a billboard. I was in a sitcom — the reruns still play, I still get residuals from that to this day — and I was in movies. So, massive success story by all means, right? But not quite.
There was always something that wasn't completely the success. That national commercial that ran during prime time, which you can actually go see on YouTube right now — I did not get a single line of dialogue. I was the silent Asian. To this day, we still play this game. We watch TV and we see an Asian, we're like, oh, silent Asian. You'll always be like, oh Asian, but that Asian never gets to speak.
And I know, these are still successes. They are — I was on TV for God's sakes. And sometimes I agree. These were big achievements. But most times I look back and I see a whole lot of wasted potential and a lot of regret.
You have to wonder, where does this idea that I keep failing come from?
So when I was a teenager, my dad sat me down after one of my first perceived failures. He sat me down with a giant sheet of poster board and he started to draw this mountain range. He drew these mountains that were like, okay, here's one, here's a higher one, here's an even higher one. And he always said, you need to aim for the highest mountain because then you can see the other mountains and decide if you like those better. But see, the thing is, he didn't actually mean that. He really meant to say these mountains are no good and we will never accept any of these mountains except for the highest one.
No matter what success I achieve, their response has always been to diminish it.
One time when my dad asked me about my finances and I actually had a full-time job. So I told him, I'm okay. And his response was, do you have a million dollars yet?
At the time, I thought that meant I wouldn't be able to get his respect until I had a million dollars. It wasn't until I relayed this story to one of the closest people in my life who also has Chinese parents. And I'm like, I can't go back and talk to my dad until I have a million dollars.
He looked at me and he said, and when you do, he's going to want even more.
And that was a moment of freedom for me. It was the first time I realized nothing will ever be enough for my father. That is freedom. When you're like, you know what? It doesn't matter what I do. So.
You've all seen those Navy Seal training videos where they do this thing called drown proofing. They tie your hands and your feet and they throw you in this nine foot pool. Your instinct is going to be to thrash around and try to stay afloat, but you can't actually survive that way. The trick is to sink.
You have to go all the way to rock bottom and then you can push off and get back up. And they call that the bottom bounce. I think of it like a reverse mountain on my father's whiteboard. Go down to go up.
The first time I tried to write the story of being the loser of Harvard, the only one who didn't make a lot of money and become a lawyer or an I-banker — I didn't even make it in Hollywood. I didn't really make it much in anything.
I was taking a class with a very accomplished personal essayist and journalist. And I kept trying to say that the lesson of this story is that I had to learn to define my own success. I'm like, that sounds really nice, rich white lady, but that isn't actually the lesson. I needed another decade of failure before I would finally see the pattern.
I guess in a way my dad is right. I needed to get to the highest mountains in order to look down and see what I could do about my failures.
I used to be so ashamed of my failures. When it came time to start this podcast again, I was like, what am I even going to talk about? Like how I've just failed again and again and again. And the answer was yes.
I started to tell people my story. I would just outright say I got a celebrity book club to back me and I got a top agent and I created the most entertaining and intelligent writing that I could in multiple books at a level I could only dream of when I was a kid. And no one cares. You could have all of this happen to you and still not have the one thing that you've always wanted, which is a published book.
And you know what happened when I started talking about this? Instead of pitying me, everybody was really supportive and kind and empathetic and they related to me and every single one of them waited until after we hung up to laugh at me, which I found very touching. No, I mean, they were actually great.
Being able to say this out loud, the more I owned my loser status, the more people actually related to me. Published authors agreed to come onto my podcast, even though I'm basically broadcasting my failures to strangers. Unpublished writers told me that my story terrified them, and I would say, yes, this is terrifying. They said it was depressing, and I would say, yes, I am depressed by the state of the writing industry all the time.
And all this terror and anxiety and awfulness bonded us. Because here's what I realized. Everyone is performing success all the time, even when we're drowning. Especially when we're drowning.
In episode 65, Top Three Publishing Myths Busted, I asked my guest, am I not getting a book deal because I dropped too many F-bombs? And she was like, no, there's never too many. As if my language was the problem and not the fact that publishing is this luck-based industry.
The real question I started asking was, is this how I want people to see me? As someone who hides my struggles and pretends everything's fine? And the answer is no. I have never been that person.
Here's something funny. Beck's song Loser became the unofficial anthem of Gen X, the cultural backbone of the early 90s, and it only peaked at number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100. I can imagine my father saying, number 10, boy you are a loser.
That's the thing about the bottom bounce. Every time you hit rock bottom, you reach something solid to push off of. And that solid thing is the truth. It's the reality that you have nowhere to go but up. You have a strange freedom that comes from having absolutely nothing left to lose. Hey, you might just have a podcast.
So if you're listening to this and you are drowning in your almost-but-not-quite moments, if you're tired of performing success when you are barely surviving failure, come sink to the bottom with me. There are so many of us down here that the water is actually really warm.
And that bounce. That bounce is everything.
Thanks for joining me at the Sophia Chang Show today. I really appreciate you listening and I would love for you to join me at my newsletter. You can sign up down below. It's at my Substack. You get a whole bunch of freebies and it's a zero cost way to support me. I'll see you next time.
