Try Again

September 16, 2025


It’s a quiet phrase, almost too soft for how heavy it can feel in the mouth. Because when something you’ve poured yourself into falls flat, when the idea you wrestled onto canvas or paper or screen is met with silence, or worse, confusion, it doesn’t feel like a gentle nudge toward perseverance. It feels like a door shutting. Like a cold shoulder. Like maybe you were wrong to even try in the first place.

And that ache, that hesitation to reach again, to risk again, is something every artist knows. Not just rejection, but the internal unraveling that follows it. The second-guessing. The “maybe I’m not cut out for this.” Maybe it was a fluke. Maybe it just wasn’t good enough.

But what if you expected the misfire? What if the first try was never supposed to land?

The truth, the one nobody really wants to hear, is that most things don’t work the first time. Not the painting. Not the poem. Not the performance or pitch or collection or concept. The gap between what you imagine and what you make is real, and it is vast. And crossing it takes more than talent. It takes teeth. It takes the willingness to sit back down, again and again, with the sting of disappointment still fresh and your hands trembling slightly, and begin anyway.

Trying again isn’t just a strategy. It’s an ethic. It’s a belief that something deeper is happening beneath the failed attempts, that each effort is a layer, not a mistake. The first attempt isn’t a failure; it’s the foundation. The second isn’t a waste; it’s refinement. The third, the fourth, the fiftieth, each one getting closer, truer, bolder. Until finally, something catches. Something breathes.

The mistake is in thinking it should have worked the first time.

If we could shift the expectation, not to perfection, but to persistence, then trying again becomes less about shame and more about rhythm. Like brushstrokes. Like breaths. Each one not an isolated act, but part of the whole.

So when the work doesn’t land. When the idea fizzles. When the silence is louder than the applause you hoped for. Let that moment fall. And then, quietly, fiercely, pick it back up.

Try again. Try differently. Try without the weight of needing it to be perfect. Try with the knowledge that every artist you admire has failed more times than they’ve succeeded, and that their only real secret was they kept going.

Let the failure be part of the process, not the full stop.

Try again, always. That’s the work.