When Kickstarter is Kicking Your A**

Three days ago I was really discouraged. Like throw-in-the-towel-on-my-music-career-and-move-to-a-deserted-island discouraged. I was done with this city and its wild and seemingly unattainable dreams and I wanted to pack all my bags and move somewhere where I could just pick berries and milk goats in peace for the rest of my life. 

I can’t tell you the exact thing that triggered this meltdown but almost always, the root cause of my jump-ship-immediately tendency is shame. Shame likes to rear its ugly head whenever I put myself out there and can’t check to make sure everyone still likes me and is OK with my existence as a human being. Often, posting anything remotely vulnerable to social media feels like standing naked on stage with millions of unresponsive eyes staring at me. Launching a Kickstarter this month has felt like that if it did 17 lines of cocaine and drank 15 venti iced coffees.  

The Kickstarter started out great. The first couple days I felt so surrounded and supported and zen. I felt like I really trusted the Lord no matter what happened and didn’t have huge expectations. I had a doing-yoga-at-sunset-on-the-beach kind of peace deep down in my bones. Then the last week hit and I had barely crossed the 20% line and it was like I woke up to the very real possibility that I could fail. I could not make it. I could work as hard as I possibly could, send every right email, film every obnoxious video, and I could still come up short of $10,000. (Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing platform so if you don’t raise it all you don’t receive anything.) Shame began to build up intensely and immediately in my chest. Cue breakdown. 

I had a moment last year when I realized that I don’t have a fear of failing, I have a fear of failing in front of people. It is one thing to try a yoga pose at home alone and fall out of it, it is a completely different thing to do it in a room full of 50 other people and, when you look around, everyone else has perfectly nailed their tree. For the most part, no one sees my failures. You don’t see it when I receive an email filled with mostly negative song feedback or I have a co-write that doesn’t run smoothly and everyone leaves feeling like they wasted their time. This kind of “failure” doesn’t bother me. I am able to look at those things as lessons learned and nothing personal. I move on easily. 

The kind of “failure” that seems to take up residency under my skin for months and months after it happens is when I hit a bad note on stage or I say something stupid in a group of people--things that can be seen and dissected and discussed because they were watched by others. Kickstarter is a very intensional invitation for people to follow along to see if I succeed or fail. It is a very public forum in which people (whose opinions I can absolutely not control) are allowed to sit in the stands of my life and watch me flail around in the arena. Or so this is the image I painted in my mind. 

Three days ago, once I had the realization that I could fail (and probably would, based on my low percentage of money raised), I decided to fail quietly. “If I withdraw from social media now; if I stop sending emails; if I no longer bring it up in conversation, everyone will forget about it and they won’t watch me fail,” went my mindset. I had half a mind to click the “delete this project” button on the Kickstarter website. If it was going to fail, I wanted to be in control of its failure. Like when you reject someone before they have a chance to reject you. 

Then yesterday morning I ended up at my favorite little corner of Nashville--Radnor Lake. Coffee in hand, I followed the mulch trail in and out of muted orange and red tree branches as the cool air calmed my anxious heart. If God’s voice has a favorite place to manifest, this is it. I felt him pushing back against my declaration to throw in the towel early. I felt him calling me to more than quitting. Then a new declaration began to rise up in me: “if this thing fails, it is not going to be because I gave up.” I repeated it to myself over and over again. I started praying new prayers--bold prayers that required me to be even riskier and more vocal than I was before. I went home and I drew out a plan to finish this Kickstarter as strong as I possibly could. 

I am writing this five days before my Kickstarter ends. I want you to know that because I want you to know that I’m writing this from a place of not knowing how the story goes. I don’t know if I’ll reach my goal or not; I don’t know if I’ll be in the studio next month or trying to find another way to get my songs out into the world. The purpose of anything we do is not to be certain of the outcome but to be deeply rooted in who we are during the process. The true miracle of this month will not be raising $10,000, it is that God took a heart prone to giving up when things get dicey and injected it with the courage and persistence to finish in an honorable and loud way. If the whole purpose of this campaign was for God to teach me how not to be a quitter when I’m scared or uncomfortable I can truly, truly say it was worth it. 

Here’s the thing: you and I are going to fail. We’re going to try things that don’t work; we’re going to get up to bat and strike out. It’s just a part of this whole humanity thing. But to not try--to not attempt the new creative project or take the job or move to the place--to not take a risk because we may look silly for half a second to a small handful of people who may not even have our best interest in mind, that is the worst kind of failure. Know that you are not alone if your gut instinct is to always run when you feel vulnerable in front of people, but also know that you don’t have to listen to the voice that tells you that the risk you’re taking isn’t worth it. Because it is. It is always worth it to try something new and to know that, no matter how the story ends, you refused to quit in the process.