Foreword

Last year, our creative writing community saw changes to our executive team, placing us on a path to becoming a more collaborative and inspiring environment for aspiring writers. As your blog editors for this academic year, Zoey and I are on a mission to provide a platform where student writers can showcase their creative work with Bolo Tie Collective members and the MacEwan community at large. One such writer is a passionate MacEwan alum and previously published contributor to The Bolo Tie Collective: Volume V, Alaye Idikio, whose short and sweet literary style is breathing life into the blog with this year’s first post.  If you keep up with our monthly newsletter, In The Loop, you’ll remember that November’s writing prompt was about fear. Readers, as we traverse into this new year, we hope that Alaye’s candid piece on “fear” will connect with you and encourage you to join her in expressing your most authentic and creative selves this year.

Your Blog Editors,

Angela Mlowe and Zoey McRae

Fearing Failure

By: Alaye Idikio

It took me a while to find my voice for this blog. In a cruel bit of irony, the very subject that I was trying to broach is what held me back. Fear is tricky. I’ve been afraid of many things: the dark, heights (though only when I climb a very high ladder), and even bee stings, as I was stung once as a child and, naturally, was not fond of it. Now, even as an adult, some fears linger,  like those pesky bees that still fly around my face, even when I do seemingly nothing to attract them.

But in the last few years, just one thing has been my real fear. It holds me back and creates unwanted feelings of frustration in me. To explain, I want you to imagine travelling down a road. Are you walking? Are you running? It doesn’t matter. Because no matter how far you go or how fast you try to get to the end, no matter how long you are on this road, you not only make no progress but sometimes seem to go backward, even if you haven’t missed a single step. After a while, you wonder why you even bother. You might get a little worried that you’ll never reach the end. You get concerned that you’ll fail.

That’s my fear: the fear of failure. The feeling that my efforts won’t matter. It’s made me cautious, but it’s also held me back in many ways, and I still haven’t figured out how to overcome it, at least not yet. But I’m making progress. I’m always looking for ways to find that success. That road gets shorter every day.