What They Never Tell You
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
No one tells you what to do
when you fail.
Not the cinematic version,
not the polished “fail better” myth
stitched onto coffee mugs and Pinterest boards—
but the real kind.
The kind that leaves your ribs aching
and your mouth tasting like metal.
The kind that knocks the breath out of you
and waits to see if you’ll bother getting up.
They don’t tell you what to do
when you try again
and fail again
and the world doesn’t wink at you,
doesn’t whisper
this is the part of the story where you rise.
Sometimes you don’t rise.
Sometimes you just lie there,
spread out across the floor of your quiet life,
and realise there is no rising coming.
No one warns you about the shame
of being ordinary
in a world where everyone pretends
they’re one hustle away from greatness.
They don’t say a word
about how heavy it feels
to watch everyone else get chosen
while you sit in the background of your own life,
becoming easier every day
to ignore,
to forget,
to look through.
Motivation gurus never mention
that some of us won’t make it—
not because we didn’t want it enough,
not because we didn’t grind
until our bones felt hollow—
but because not every story
was written to bloom.
So what do you do then,
in the silence after failing
again and again
without ever failing better,
just failing more?
You learn to live inside the smaller version
of the life you imagined—
the mundane, the mediocre,
the quiet corners no one claps for.
You learn to breathe there.
You learn to stay.
You learn to carry the weight
of being unremarkable
without letting it crush you.
And maybe—
if there is anything left in you—
you learn to love the version of yourself
who keeps trying
even when the world
never once promised
that trying would be enough.
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Poetry Anthologies by Britt Wolfe:
