I’ve always been afraid of failure and I failed last night. Long story short, I was hoping to do some close up shots that would require my hands to be “aged up” with foam latex prosthetics (adding swollen joints to mimic arthritis). First, I underestimated how long setting up the shots would take. Second, I underestimated how long the prosthetics would take to dry. Third, I never used PAX paint (a combo acrylic paint and proaide adhesive that you can use to color and seal foam latex prosthetics) and didn’t realize how sticky it actually is and how it needs constant powdering, particularly tricky when you don’t have someone assisting you aka another set of hands.

When the early morning hours continued to creep in, I not only noticed the amount of time I had for shots dwindling but that my hands were sticking together as I worked, ripping and tearing at the arthritic prosthetics. A bit heartbroken, I made a decision to take off the prosthetics, clean up, get some shut eye, and reassess later the next day or at least after I got some rest. However, my brain kept telling me what had happened — the thing I had feared most: I had failed.

But I hadn’t.

Success sometimes isn’t crossing every “t” or dotting every “i”. Sometimes it’s just taking a step forward and learning from setbacks. I had never used foam latex prosthetics before and I had done a good job initially applying it: success. I had set up the camera and discovered my tiny green screen setup would work: success. I made PAX paint and matched my skin tone pretty closely on first try: success.

I created, ran into some issues, learned from the issues and pivoted: success.

Our brains our funny. They often make us fear failure and then create the single perfect scenario that it would deserve the label of success. If we don’t achieve that often lofty goal, then we’ve failed. All of this is an ass backwards way our brains try to “protect us.” Our brains set ourselves up to “fail.”

Unfortunately, I didn’t take a photo of my hands for I ripped off the latex but I wanted to share the set layout. It was great seeing it all my props together.