A recent Sunday morning started with a squeal—mine—at an hour that pained my partner (if the look on his face was anything to go by) and at a level that pained the dog (if the look on her face was any indication). “Lookatthoselayers,” I enthused, jabbing a finger toward the tray of sourdough croissants proofing on the counter. The dog and my Chief Recipe Taster took a dutiful look. Truly, they were beautiful: what looked to be hundreds of layers of dough and butter are stacked perfectly, proportionately, on top of one another and then rolled into crescents. I basted them carefully with an egg wash; slid them lovingly, into a hot-but-not-too-hot oven. I set the timer, suffused with satisfaction. This time, this time, it would be different. This time, they would turn out.

You see, my baking history is littered with numerous decidedly less-than-perfect croissants. In my decade plus of serious amateur baking, I have produced croissants that could be used as cruise ship anchors, those marred by improperly incorporated butter packages, and others that have been too wet, too dry, or not at all flaky. Mind you, those were the croissants that I made with commercial yeast, before the idea of using sourdough ever occurred to me. Substituting one leavening agent for another did not, unsurprisingly, alleviate my problems; it added a whole new set of variables. Was I using enough starter? Was it active enough? Was it properly hydrated?

On the Sunday in question, however, I was supremely confident; my unbaked croissants had never looked better. So I poured myself another cup of coffee and sat down with a crossword puzzle. I was already anticipating how they’d smell and taste when I smelled something I’d not planned on, something not so delicious, something decidedly like burning butter. Panicked, I rushed over to the oven and found that, sure enough, my croissants were spilling butter like the Exxon Valdez spilled oil. So much butter had leaked out and onto the bottom of the tray that my poor croissants were frying on the bottom and baking on the top. When the timer went off, I pulled them out and dropped the tray onto the stove, frustrated. My Chief Recipe Taster nabbed one, singeing his fingers and tongue as he stuffed a bite in his mouth. “Mmmph,” he said. “Not bad!” I appreciated the support, but I knew the truth—once again, my croissants were a flop.

Given how those croissants turned out, as well as the many other croissants I’ve made over the years that have also not turned out, it might be easy to conclude that I am a failure at croissant making. I have not had much success in croissant making; ergo, I am a failure at making croissants. Right?

As a recovering perfectionist, I am pretty much allergic to failure. In fact, I am so averse to failure that I am loathe to even try things that I think I might not succeed at. Take a martial arts class? No way. Sign up for an ultra-distance bike ride? Nope. Volunteer for a work project that feels way over my head? I’d rather not, because trying something I “know” I could fail at seems like a great way to get hurt. For a few years now, it’s seemed safer to not try. But increasingly, saying “I’d rather not” has started to feel less like I’m keeping myself safe and more like I’m holding myself back. So over the course of a few weeks, I set out to examine failure: what it is, what it means to me.

My thought experiment ran into trouble almost as soon as I began. I’d started in what seemed like the most obvious place to start: by defining “failure.” Well, I thought, that was simple—failing is not succeeding. I thought of times in my life when I had not succeeded. I remembered the class in which I’d gotten a “D,” the marathon I couldn’t finish, the fact that I wasn’t accepted into my first-choice college—even this food blog, which pretty much only my mom reads (thanks, Mom!). But as I went back and dwelled in my memories of those perceived failures, I realized that what I had felt had names besides failure: disappointment, regret, the uncomfortable sense of having made a mistake. The more I thought about those experiences, the less they felt like failures and more just like experiments in the world that didn’t go the way I’d hoped. I realized too that I had learned something from each of those experiences, so perhaps they were less failures and more… growth. None of those experiences had been fun or comfortable, but when is growth either of those things?

I also realized that this is the way I already think about things in the kitchen: I don’t see baking flops as failures, but as valuable experiments. I turn into a mad scientist in the kitchen, taking risks all over the place, always asking “what if,” or “could this be better?” Sometimes, those risks pay off; sometimes they don’t. Somehow, I rarely get upset, even after a flop: I might be disappointed, I might have made a mistake somewhere along the way, but it isn’t a failure—for me, there is no such thing as failure in the kitchen. I tried something, I have a result, and that gives me new information to use when I repeat the experiment.

I decided to extend my reasoning. What if I entertained the idea that there was no such thing as failure? Just thinking that thought did funny things to my brain. It was like opening a window and letting a bracing breeze swirl in a clear away the fog. If there was, for me, no such thing as failure, then there was so much less fear of it, and so much less to lose if I took a chance. Thinking like this makes me want to sign up for a 150-mile bike ride, just to see what I can do. It makes me want to try. It makes me want to tear down every one of those “what would you do if you knew you could not fail” signs and replace them with a new slogan: “there is no such thing as failure.”

This is all easy to say, harder to do; I’m still working on applying this concept to my life outside of the kitchen. In fact, figuring out how to do that has delayed the writing and publishing of this essay for a solid month, because it would be neat and tidy to end with a rousing paragraph about how I learned to banish the concept of failure from every aspect of my life and you can, too. But that isn’t what’s happened. I’m still experimenting, still learning to push myself from that “I’d rather not” mindset to the mad scientist one. It’s slow going, but it is going—and it continues in the kitchen, too. Just one week after I made the croissants that managed to both bake and fry, I made another batch. Because of that experience, I knew to not let my croissants get too warm while proofing. I’d learned. I was careful with the next batch. And you know what? They turned out great—a successful experiment.

P.S. Want to try making croissants yourself? This recipe was the basis for my sourdough experiments. And recently—after my trials and tribulations, of course—the New York Times created this guide.