In front of the skeleton of my IKEA chest of drawers, I wept fat, ugly tears. The instructions, in picture form, and left me indignant at their assumption of my illiteracy, and even more upset that I could not begin to comprehend them.
I was left to rummage through the plastic sacks of easily losable screws and bolts to find the exact right pieces for the exact right places, which seemed to me an insurmountable task. The dresser, meant as a show of competency as my own first addition to my parent-free house, became a symbol of my own insufficiency, a testament to my dependence, a tangible monument to failure.
Every fiber of insecurity was embodied in this unfinished piece of generic Swedish furniture. The only response I was able to muster was to lie prostrate in front of it, stare it down with tear-dyed eyes, and send increasingly passive aggressive text messages to my significant other. As I mulled over my great failure, my mind played the same track over and over again, interpreting my whirl of frustration and self-loathing: I am irrational. I know that I am being irrational. I am a completely lucid being who wallows despite knowing exactly how little good wallowing does. However, this awareness of my own ridiculousness did nothing but make the dresser seem more gigantesque in comparison to my own incompetent, self-pitying being.
In the end, I lost my battle with the IKEA dresser. I first enlisted the help of my sibling, then when that failed miserably, the help of my father. At this point, I was too emotionally distraught by the mere sight of the unfinished piece of furniture to even offer my help in its final construction. Instead, I hid in my room while my dad conquered the beast, still feeling sorry for myself and cursing my stupidity. Even two years after the fact, my inability to assemble a simple IKEA dresser still stands out to me as one of my greatest failures. Again, my irrationality is evident here.
Despite numerous failures with real consequences since the IKEA debacle, it still haunts me. How is it that a stupid dresser still bothers me more than the botched breakups, subpar essays, college rejections, and missed opportunities since that defining failure?
Though I still hate that IKEA piece of shit with all of my heart and soul, our cold war has helped me form my new perspective on failure. The difference between my IKEA adversary and the numerous challenges that have gotten the better of me in the subsequent years is not the level of difficulty or the significance to my life: Jesus, it was only a piece of furniture. Instead, it was a question of effort. I failed to put together that goddamn dresser because I didn’t try.I took one look at those miserable instructions, panicked because I don’t think spatially, and spent the next week staring down that hunk of wood with the intensity of a bull staring down a matador without ever lifting a finger to change the situation.
Yes, I’ve broken hearts and been heartbroken, done poorly on tests and been disappointed by the hell that is college admissions, but I’ve also worked my ass off to mend relationships, complete extra credit paper revisions, and fall in love with my darling (if occasionally problematic) Reed. IKEA dresser failures hurt because there is always a what if: how would I feel if I’d demonstrated my independence and became a badass handyman? What if I’d built the dresser and polished it? Would I be more of an adult?
The Great Dresser Debacle may seem like an insignificant and silly story to share, and it probably is. But we make monsters out of the molehills we don’t investigate closely enough to see the very non-scary mole whiskers poking out of. Failures are inevitable, but the only failures worth having are the failures that we worked damned hard to reach.
