The Art Of Failing Forward
One way to read the pattern of Bessie Blount Griffin’s life is as a pattern of failing forward.
The teacher who punished her for writing with her left hand produced someone who could write with her teeth and her feet. The VA’s rejection of her feeding device produced a transfer of rights to France. The VA’s rejection of her emesis basin produced an adoption in Belgium. The limitations of her formal education produced a lifelong self-teacher who eventually trained at Scotland Yard.
Each obstacle in this pattern produced a response that moved Blount forward rather than stopping her. The response was not always the obvious one — she did not fight the VA in court, did not launch a public campaign against them, did not spend years seeking redress. She found the available alternative and used it.
This pragmatic adaptability is its own form of genius. It is easier, in many ways, to pursue a single strategy that works than to constantly identify and use alternative strategies when the primary one is blocked. Blount spent her career finding alternatives.
The alternative pathway was often more interesting than the original one: France was a better destination for the feeding device than the VA, because France would use it. Scotland Yard was a more rigorous training environment than any American institution had offered her. The forensic consulting business she ran in her own right was more independently satisfying than working within a bureaucratic institution that might have rejected her work.
The obstacles did not merely fail to stop her. They redirected her toward things that, in retrospect, were sometimes better than what she had originally sought.