Hello, my friends!

What if the failures you're most ashamed of were worth putting on display?

That's the question I sat with after reading How to Try Again by Steve Kamb, founder of Nerd Fitness. He's helped busy people rebuild their health habits for 17 years, and his whole message is that setbacks don't erase you.

My favorite part was the museum of failure, a collection of things that didn't work out on purpose put on display. It sent me straight to one of mine: a yo-yo diet and exercise cycle from my twenties.

I'm a recovering perfectionist and overachiever, and that shaped exactly how I fell apart.

A lot of you know this pattern even if you've never named it. You hold yourself to a high standard. Life makes that standard impossible for a stretch, and rather than do the habit poorly, you stop doing it altogether. You promise yourself you'll come back when you can do it right again.

That feeling has a name. It's shame, and for high achievers it threatens consistency far more than any lack of discipline.

This was one of my quit-and-restart cycles, except it turned into the deepest one I've ever fallen into. I've never shared this failure before.

So let me put it on display.

Cancer arrived while I was in college.

I had surgery and started radiation therapy in the middle of my degree, and I spent most of those years sick, moving between classes, medical appointments, and treatment.

When graduation came, I walked without a single academic award. For the first time in my life I'd come away from something empty-handed. It hurt more than I let on.

Some people had a theory about why. They said the radiation had fried my brain. 🤣

So I set out to prove them wrong.

I poured everything I had into the national physical therapy licensure exam, and in 2014 I placed second in the entire country. In the Philippines, the top ten examinees (called “board exam topnotchers”) are publicly recognized.

I earned a scholarship and cash prize for it too.

That result opened a door I hadn't expected.

The university asked me to come teach, and I said yes. It was a blessing, my first real job, part-time faculty teaching physical therapy to students who looked up to me.

Somewhere in those teaching years, I turned back to my own body.

I'd been sporty and active before cancer, and the treatment had taken that from me. I got winded going up a single flight of stairs. My body had stopped feeling like mine.

So I went to the campus gym and got to work, three times a week, with a trainer I liked and my husband training beside me.

The gym was only a two-minute walk from our faculty office. I had no excuses.

I used my own physical therapy skills on myself, and slowly it paid off. I got stronger. I stopped losing my breath so easily, and going to the gym gave me the motivation to eat better too.

The two braided together into one thing.

That one thing became a badge. Stacked on top of the topnotcher title and the teaching job, it was proof I had beaten back what cancer did to me, body and mind both.

The "disciplined" Grazelle at the front of the room who had rebuilt herself from the ground up.

That was who I thought I was.

The Philippine education system added two extra years of high school, which meant colleges had no incoming students for two years while the change took effect.

The school had to let staff go, and I was only part-time. So they let me go. From a business standpoint I understood it completely.

Around the same time, the PT clinic at the community hospital where I worked closed down, so I lost that job too. My US work visa had been crawling through the system for what felt like forever.

Losing both jobs at once didn't feel like ordinary bad luck.

I told myself I was a failure, a bad example, a jobless topnotcher.

The Grazelle who had proven everyone wrong now looked like she was proving them right.

I was an alumni of the school. I could have kept showing up to the campus gym, and no one would have questioned it. But I disappeared instead.

For a while I genuinely believed my own board exam “topnotching” had become a curse, as if the recognition had only existed to make the fall hurt more later.

When the identity cracked, both habits went down with it.

I started stress-eating street food: deep fried batter-coated eggs, grilled chicken intestines on a stick, steamed pork dumplings called siomai.

Every other time in my life, a low stretch like this would eventually swing back up. That was the pattern. This time there was no upswing anywhere in sight.

Researchers Janet Polivy and C. Peter Herman have a name for what happened next. They call it the "what the hell" effect.

One broken rule doesn't just cost you that single rule. Your brain decides the whole thing is already ruined, so you might as well give up and go all the way down.

It's usually studied in dieting research, and it shows up anywhere you've drawn a hard line for yourself. Crossing that line once while you're already ashamed makes it stop mattering at all.

It's a perfectionist's disease, in a way. It bites the people who set the bar high enough to fall from.

Nothing about my situation improved for a long while.

The visa didn't come, I still had no job, and I was still hiding from everyone I knew.

Then my siblings and I started a little bead necktie business. It was mostly something to do while we waited. We made them together at my husband's office, and it was just fun. No pressure, nothing to prove, no one keeping score.

That last part turned out to matter more than I understood at the time.

Because in that space with nothing to perform, I stopped drowning in the things I couldn't move. The visa, the jobs, my health, none of it was in my hands.

One small thing was. I started eating oatmeal again for breakfast, on purpose.

It was ordinary, and it was entirely mine to choose. It didn't fix a single one of my problems. But it reminded me I still had a lever I could pull.

This is what I learned from my worst cycle.

When you feel stuck, dwelling on everything outside your control, you can take back a piece of yourself by doing the one thing still in your hands. For me it was a bowl of oatmeal.

Eventually the visa came.

Then came the next adventure of moving to the US with my husband. A whole new chapter I couldn't have seen from inside that year of waiting.

You might be building a health habit right now that's going well. And then life will happen, the way it always does.

Sometimes it's big, like a lost job or a health scare.

More often it's ordinary.

A stretch of bad weather, a sick kid, a week of travel, a deadline that eats your evenings.

When the disruption comes, you don't have to surrender the whole thing just because you can't do it impressively. Keep the habit present, even in a smaller form.

A ten-minute walk in place of the full workout. One vegetable on the plate in place of the whole meal plan.

What matters is that it stays alive, at whatever size fits the week you're actually in.

That idea is the whole reason I built the Dial Method template, a tool for turning a habit down instead of off. The Dial Method template sets the habit to the effort level you can actually reach today.

Some days that dial sits high, and some days it's barely above zero. Both count, because both keep you in the game.

If you're the kind of person who's used to achieving, you already have discipline in abundance. That was never your missing piece.

What you need is permission to do the habit badly and keep going anyway, plus a space now and then where your health isn't a performance you could fail.

The next time life knocks a habit loose, resist the urge to wait until you can do it perfectly again. Turn the dial down and stay in it.

Consistent, not perfect, is what actually carries you across the years.

That's the whole game. A habit you refuse to abandon, even when it has to get small.

Progress over perfection,

Grazelle 🌱