Fear of Failure: What 133 Views Taught Me About Showing Up Anyway

Yesterday, I wrote about showing up before you feel ready. Today, I want to tell you what happens after you do.

Because showing up before you're ready sounds wonderfully brave—right up until the moment you put something out into the world, glance at your phone a few hours later, and discover that your grand act of courage has been witnessed by exactly 133 people.

One hundred and thirty-three.

Humbling.

As I mentioned yesterday, I recently joined a beta program with a wonderful new coach, and one of my commitments is to run my own social media. Three pieces of content, every single day. A video. An image. A written post. On repeat.

And here's the slightly ridiculous part: I already know how to do this.

I've consulted and coached for years, though I do far less of that now. I run more than one business. Some lean on me heavily, others have brilliant teams doing the heavy lifting, and I've spent a long time helping other people untangle their marketing, their messaging, their funnels, their sales, their growth. I've watched people build real audiences and real income using advice that came straight out of my own mouth.

So if one of them came to me, deflated because a post only reached 133 people, I wouldn't hesitate for a second. I'd tell them to keep going.

Apparently, it's my turn to take my own advice.

The Fear of Failure Gets Louder When the Work Is Personal

Karma Penguin feels different from everything else I've built, and I think it's because Karma Penguin feels like me.

I'm not just trying to sell something here. I'm trying to make something.

A space. A community. A soft place to land on a hard day, where somebody might arrive feeling frayed and leave feeling a little less alone. A place where we can talk honestly about nervous systems and healing, about motherhood and perfectionism, about big dreams and ordinary Tuesdays and the wonderfully strange business of being human.

I want to build tools and little products that genuinely make people's lives feel lighter. I care about this small corner of the internet enormously—probably too much, if I'm honest.

It's why we've rebuilt the website more times than I'd like to admit. It's why I can lose an entire afternoon obsessing over a detail no one else would ever notice. It's why an innocent-sounding sentence like "Can we just change this one tiny thing?" has almost certainly given several people who work with me a nervous twitch.

So while we're here: thank you. To our patient, brilliant web designer. To my assistant, our contributors, our vendors, and everyone who has lovingly tolerated my occasional over-the-top devotion. When something matters to me, I go all in—sometimes a little too far in.

Recovering perfectionist. The recovering part matters.

And running my own social media has apparently uncovered a fresh little pocket of perfectionism I hadn't fully dealt with yet.

Because knowing how to market something and letting yourself be seen are two entirely different things. The fear of failure gets so much louder when the thing you're sharing has pieces of you tucked inside it.

That's the lesson I'm sitting with today.

When 133 Views Starts to Feel Like a Verdict

Logically, I know exactly what 133 views means. It means 133 views. That's it. It's a single piece of information about a single post on a single day of what I hope will be a very long journey.

My rational business brain understands this completely.

My emotional brain, however, runs a far more theatrical operation. She sees that number and immediately starts asking questions.

Was it bad? Was it embarrassing? Does nobody care? Should we change everything? Should we stop? Should we perhaps relocate to a remote island with no Wi-Fi and, therefore, no analytics to torture ourselves with?

And if I let those thoughts run long enough, they eventually arrive at the fear beneath all the other fears.

Maybe it's me.

That's the part so many of us feel and so few of us say out loud.

"This post didn't perform well" quietly becomes "I didn't perform well." "People didn't respond to this" slides into "People don't respond to me." "This needs work" curdles into "I'm not good enough."

Standing in the middle of disappointment, those sentences can sound almost identical. They are not. Not even close.

When we build something that carries pieces of who we are, it becomes surprisingly hard to separate the response to our work from our feelings about ourselves. We pour in our ideas, our time, our creativity, our hope. Sometimes our money. Sometimes our stories. Sometimes the tender parts of us we weren't even sure we wanted strangers examining in the first place.

Then we press publish. And we wait.

Of course that feels vulnerable.

I Wanted to Delete It

I wanted to delete things. I wanted to redo them. I wanted to overhaul the entire strategy that very second. And yes, there was a moment where I genuinely wanted to stop posting altogether.

There may also have been a small amount of obsessive refreshing to see whether the number had magically transformed since the last time I checked.

It had not.

Apparently, staring at your analytics does not inspire the algorithm. Who knew.

But I didn't delete anything. Just like I don't delete a blog post because I wake up the next morning quietly wondering if I should have phrased something differently.

I made a promise to show up. So I showed up. And I'm going to keep showing up.

Not because every post will be good—it won't. Not because every idea will land—it won't. And definitely not because I expect to morph overnight into some flawless social media unicorn who always knows exactly what the internet wants.

I'm going to keep going because that is precisely what I would tell someone else to do.

And maybe part of growing up is finally being willing to give ourselves the same patience, the same grace, and the same good advice we hand out so freely to everyone else.

The Fear of Failure Doesn't Mean You Stop

I think we tend to imagine "going all in" as one beautiful, cinematic moment. We make the decision. We believe in ourselves. We leap. The music swells, the universe applauds, and everything falls perfectly into place.

Real life is considerably less polished.

Sometimes going all in means you pour your heart into something and almost no one sees it. Sometimes you launch something and it flops. Sometimes you make the wrong call. Sometimes you change your mind. Sometimes you fall flat on your face.

Sometimes you just plain fail.

And then?

You learn something. You dust yourself off. You put on a pretty dress and a little lipstick. And you come back—hopefully a little wiser, maybe with a better plan, and definitely in better spirits.

Because when we truly care about what we're building, we put ourselves into it. That's the very thing that makes it matter. And it's also exactly why it stings when things don't go the way we hoped.

The answer isn't to stop caring. It's learning how to hold the fear of failure with an open hand—to care deeply without letting every outcome decide something about who we are.

I'm still working on that one.

Today, I woke up after being awake most of the night, and I feel pretty rough. I'm tired. I'm low on energy. I did not spring out of bed radiating entrepreneurial enthusiasm, ready to conquer the internet.

But I'm still here. I'm still in. And I'm still doing the thing I said I'd do.

Strangely, that alone makes me feel so much better.

Nothing extraordinary happened overnight. The numbers didn't explode. I didn't wake up magically cured of perfectionism. I simply kept a promise to myself.

And maybe that's what showing up before you're ready eventually becomes, if you do it long enough. It stops being one brave moment and turns into a relationship you're building with yourself—a quiet little pile of evidence that says, I can trust me. I said I'd come back, and I came back.

Some days we'll soar. Some days we'll get 133 views. Some days we'll fall flat on our faces.

And when we do, we'll dust ourselves off, straighten the pretty dress, reapply the lipstick, gather up our good spirits, and try again.

Because the number isn't us. The failure isn't us. And one disappointing day doesn't get to decide how the story ends.

We do.

Waddle on, dear reader. Waddle on. ❤️

About the Author | Day 225

I'm a soul-led coach, writer, entrepreneur, mother, and recovering perfectionist currently learning that giving good advice is a great deal easier than taking my own.

For 225 days straight, I've shown up here and written about life while I'm living it—not from the tidy distance of having it all figured out. That's meant writing through exhaustion and motherhood, through business lessons and nervous system work, through faith and big dreams and uncomfortable truths and perfectly ordinary moments. It's meant writing on the days when disappearing would have been so much easier than showing up.

Karma Penguin lives especially close to my heart because it was never just another business. It's my attempt to build a place where people can feel seen, laugh, heal, grow, and maybe stumble onto something that makes life feel a little lighter and a little more beautiful.

Which is exactly what makes sharing it feel so vulnerable.

I'm slowly learning to loosen my grip on the fear of failure—not to confuse a number with my worth, a disappointing result with failure, or something that simply needs improvement with proof that I shouldn't be doing this at all.

Today, I don't feel my best.

But I showed up anyway. And after 225 days, I'm starting to believe those may be the days that count the most.

Day 225 of 365. Let's Go!