‘Icarus Laughed as He Fell’: How to Find Joy in the Face of Failure

Whenever I feel defeated, this poem reminds me that failure isn’t the end of everything

Assad Abderemane
3 min readMar 31, 2021
The Fall of Icarus

I might have gotten a little too interested in the stock market since this whole Gamestop thing. I guess I dig deeper into something I know nothing about only when it hits the Twitter trends. (I’m basic like that.) Anyway.

A while after the stock market became part of pop culture, I set up a trading account, put some money dollars on it, and promptly lost some of those money dollars. Yikes. I’d like to say I was pretty chill about the whole thing because I always knew that my capital would be at risk, but I wasn’t — losing money terrifies me. The next day I went to my first doctor's appointment in years for a check-up and she noticed something wrong with my heart — something something arrhythmia, I think. My heart was beating irregularly. Might be related to the loss of those money dollars, but also might not. I’ll never know. What I did know, though, was that I could always go back to the following poem if my heart ever started to go ballistic on me because I invested in something that didn’t come to fruition, whether that investment was money in the stock market, my time in a project, or my enthusiasm in doing something new.

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Assad Abderemane

Writer based in France. Words at Level, Elemental, Gen, Human Parts, etc. Email: abderemane.m.assad@gmail.com