Failure to Launch: A Win From the Dark Side

Dan Blackman

19d • Wins

It's hard to stare down your patterns. But sometimes you have to.

My "the way I do one thing is the way I do everything" parts project has a new name:

Failure to Launch. It stars three versions of me.

DanO: The unseen man who can't seem to "book em" and launch his business.

Danielle: The "weak" man whose marriage ended in violence.

DaddyO: The father who "did everything he knew how", now looking at his adult daughter's "failures" and the endless dialogue about where he failed her.

Oh, my rude brain can get meaner. Much meaner.

Usually, this is where I pivot.

Find the lesson.

Reframe something positively.

Get curious.

Think my way through it.

and now.. sit with the feelings until something shifts.

I've gotten very good at that. Maybe too good.

Because the pattern I'm examining now is my tendency to cognate all of this into submission.

Aligning my labels of feelings to the thoughts that fit.

Another explanation.

Another framework.

Another way to make the uncomfortable thing feel manageable so I can move.

Same result. Failure to Launch.

Not this time.

This time it's a soulful staring contest.

No, "what if we tried it this way?"

No clever positive reframe.

No negotiations.

No soothing.

Neigh. 🐴

This horse doesn't get to bolt this time.

Oh and my rude brain has plenty more to keep me under the weighted blankets once it gets started...

Remember how you lost all your clients?

Remember that successful corporate career?

Twenty years at BofA.

Top 1% of VPs in your group.

Servant leader.

"Or were you mostly a conflict avoider?" it asks.

"Maybe what you called servant leadership was people-pleasing."

"Maybe what you called success drafting was following and calling it leading."

And then comes my favorite:

"You're a fraud. That's why you fail to launch."

There's the loop.

Waiting. Reframing. Aligning. Thinking. Explaining.

All those present-tense activities that can become a very sophisticated way of avoiding the Nike swoosh. Just do it.

And now my youngest daughter, living with Type 1 diabetes.

I've spent a lot of time telling myself I'm respecting her autonomy, giving her space and safety, letting her find her way. Some of that may be true. I'm the manifesting generator single Dad leading a projector teenage girl with mother wounds and shared trauma.

But I have to look at where giving space becomes avoiding the discomfort of showing up more actively as her dad.

Yeah it doesn't feel like a get to, especially as it lawyers up with all this "failure to launch" evidence.

What's fully present right now is something of an existential staring contest with the darker parts of myself.

I'm not looking for someone to tell me I'm actually successful, that everything happens for a reason, that I should be kinder to myself, or to invite a polite reframe.

I'm interested in something different.

Acknowledging the avoider.

"Yes. You're part of me. I hear you."

And you don't get to choose what I do next.

If you're a Star Wars nerd, I point you to The Clone Wars, Season 6, Episodes 11–13. Yoda prepares himself for immortality by accepting his own darkness. I have revisited this hour a few times in the last almost 5 years as I have done the work through L3 and as a coach.

This work is great at presenting the opportunity to face the parts of yourself you'd rather not encounter.

You still have to choose.

Do or do not. There is no try.

So wish me luck.

I'm putting this in Wins because I've already won, and I am grateful for the work even when I'm not and couldn't "both-and" myself out of the bed in the morning.

Thanks to this work, I can see the pattern without needing to make it disappear, justify it, or fix a damn thing in side of me. I'm not broken.

I'm launching this time.

My business.

A different way of showing up as a father.

And myself, out of this pit of dark comfort.

The pattern can call shotgun.

It doesn't get to drive.

💜

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Failure to Launch: A Win From the Dark Side