Writing with Juliet Iwelunmor

I have had a season of failures lately, each one written as a grant.

One came yesterday, my dream of a sustainable marketplace for health, with creatives. Another focused on my love of cancer research, offered to young people, failed. Another, earlier this year, focused on grants as dreams, failed. Another arrived today: AI in the service of health screening, also failed.

The sting is always the same. Defeat, and then the quiet resolve to begin again.

And even as I begin again, even as I gather one more idea to carry toward funding, I am reminded that it is this story that matters. Keep this reminder — that I, too, fail — even when my luck turns. And it will turn.

There are seasons like this. Seasons where everything we touch turns to dust. Not because we did not reach for it, but because the dust was necessary.

How we begin again — all the small, patient ways we sit down to write another grant — has its arc rooted in the place where we see, live, and wear our failure fully. Each failed attempt is whole: self-contained, sufficient, still functioning, alive in a world where anything, even failure, is possible.

So we begin again. We begin as an extension of the larger story we are always telling — that failure, too, is allowed. Each failed attempt is a proverb, adding its insight to the complexity of every success.

Failure is vital. A tributary feeding the main river of the narrative that survives. This attempt — even if it fails — at least teaches that a substantial part of the story, is the attempt itself.

Keep this.