The unimpeachable truth at the heart of the 2002 film Adaptation is that authors would rather write themselves into hellish, complicated metafictions than do emotionally difficult work. In case you haven't seen the film, here’s a synopsis: It’s written by Charlie Kaufman about a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman writing a film. I’m reminded of that movie every time I have to write something difficult and instead find myself writing about the process of writing something difficult.

Anyways, I failed all of the goals I set for myself at the beginning of 2023 and I can’t decide how to break the news to you.

I’ve tried to write this story so, so many times now. I’ve tried reframing my goals. I’ve tried writing about maladaptive perfectionism. I’ve tried explaining how yearly goals are instruments of change, but not necessarily the right tool for every change you might want to make. I’ve tried writing about the numerous times people bullied me while playing tabletop games and why… uh, hmm. I don’t remember why I started writing about that, but there are a lot of examples and I promise it made sense at the time.

None of those attempts to reflect on 2023 captured the whole story behind my goals and my life and the way things went, so I threw them out and started over. Every attempt to walk the thin line between self-flagellation and hollow, anodyne navel-gazing veered too hard in one direction or the other. Now I’m on my fifth attempt, looking down on all those failures to write about other failures. I’m squinting and I still can’t make a cohesive picture out of it.

Maybe I need to climb higher.

Maybe this story is, in fact, the real story.

Let’s talk about my failure to write about my failures to write about my failed goals for 2023.

Failure is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as

No. No, I’m not doing that.

I’ll do the harder thing. I’ll entertain the remote possibility that there is no fairy-tale lesson waiting at the end of one middle-aged man’s half-hearted attempt to order less delivery and read a biography every two months. I feel bad and I have an apophenic tendency to go searching for the meaning behind every bad feeling in my brain, but perhaps there is no satisfying kernel of truth waiting for anyone at the end of this essay.

I’m disappointed because “I stopped caring” is such a boorish and vulgar excuse for coming up short at the end of the year. But, y’know, it’s true. I stopped counting my Doordash deliveries back in July. I stopped reading biographies around the same time, too. My goals died on the vine like so many Duolingo streaks and swiped-away reminders to hit the gym. It’s a painfully common and entirely relatable outcome for a couple of common and relatable goals.

So, that’s it! The lesson was in the metafiction after all: Sometimes failure tells no tales. Despite my best efforts to pathologize every failure, the only thing failure really has to say is that I started with a plan. I deviated from that plan and I still had a great year and I’m fine.

Failure can be normal and boring. Oops.