What remains after defeat

 

We have all experienced, from childhood to old age, those small and great defeats of not reaching what we want. After the loss there comes a strange moment, almost imperceptible, when we stop running away and accept the nakedness of the present. It does not arrive with fanfare. It is silent, almost like a whisper, like letting yourself sink slowly into the depths of the sea. But the loss changes everything. Defeat has the power to show what truly belongs to us.

For a long time I treated defeats as if I were a nocturnal animal. Hiding was better than becoming the target of other wild creatures. An unexpected message could feel dangerous. Sharing something intimate was like exposing an artery. Every new project carried a silent question: what if they do not like it.

Rejection and its relatives feel like small deaths because something in us believes that recognition is the only source of oxygen. As children we learned that the gaze of the Other holds us up. When that gaze turns away, panic appears. It is not logic. It is the echo of a deep mark. We carry it into adulthood like an old wound that no longer bleeds but still hurts when touched.

The curious thing about failure is that it is an illusion, a dramatic label we stick on an unexpected turn of fate. Human rules are not universal laws. We are infinite combinations of probabilities, and each detour can open another destination. Losing what we were looking for does not mean we will not find satisfaction elsewhere. Sometimes it appears in a place we never would have anticipated.

If you want to turn left but an obstacle forces you to go right, you might find a gold coin on an unexpected path. Then was it really a failure not to be able to turn left?

However, if the gold coin does not appear at once, we suffer. Like the child who drops the pacifier, we believe we have lost the source of all happiness. My cat, when he does not like the food I give him, looks at me with disappointment, flicks his tail impatiently and simply goes off to sleep. He does not cling. He redirects his desire without drama. If you are going to fall, do it with style. Do it like the cat.

The Stoics had a name for practicing this acceptance: premeditatio malorum, the premeditation of loss. Not to train pessimism, but to take weight away from hope and strip fear of its tyranny. When you imagine the worst and discover that even after what you fear happens your core is still intact, you meet yourself without illusions.

This reminds me of the work of sculpting stone. We are beings covered in layers and illusions that, like an onion, protect us: the house, the car, the family, the job, the poem, beauty, the smile, the gaze. All of them are repeated constructions that the world taught us to value.

Defeat, even only imagined, creates a crack in those layers. If you hold defeat in your mind and allow it to come closer, you notice something unexpected: you do not disappear. You are still there. If you survive the event you will be able to tell the story, and if not, nothing matters. Fear does not have the power it claimed.

Lacan would say that the spell of the Big Other begins to crack. The imagined authority that could judge you absolutely for not achieving or sustaining what you “should” turns out to be made of ordinary humans with their own blind spots and anxieties. The world stops being a tribunal. Desire becomes freer, less obedient. Your actions stop kneeling before the fantasy of perfect validation.

And what remains after defeat is surprisingly solid. This is you:

Your curiosity remains.
Your other projects remain.
Your hybrid and strange intelligence remains.
Your voice, imperfect and necessary, remains.

Even when someone walks away. Even when a dream collapses. Even when a plan dissolves into the air. What remains is truly yours.

After defeat, what is not essential falls away like an old shell. What is essential stays there, naked and honest: your person, your memories, your capacity to imagine a better life, your will to begin again. They are not decorations. They are your spine.

Nature whispers the same lesson. The branches of the tree break. The leaves fall. But the tree persists through all its small deaths. It does not cling to its losses. It grows around them. Until the true end comes, but that one does not count, since it happens only once.

Defeat is one of the ordinary deaths of life. At times painful, yes, but not final. It is part of the ecology of becoming something else. When you stop hiding from it, you recover a part of yourself that was trapped behind fear. You gain the freedom to speak, to express yourself, to act, to love without the constant terror of disappearing in someone else’s eyes.

Defeat is not the opposite of growth. It is the doorway to what you truly are when no one is watching. And in that silence, being begins, light as a feather in the wind.