One afternoon in March, about midway through my crowdfunding campaign for The Sex Myth play, I popped out to my local deli to pick up some food for lunch.

As I waited at the crossing, a guy who looked to be in his forties approached to ask me for money. Absentmindedly, I told him no, and he grabbed me and tried to kiss me.

Then I did something I had never done before: I shoved him off and told him to leave me alone.

He didn’t, instead sidling up again to ask me what my name was, and again I told him to leave me alone. “I don’t like being grabbed by strangers.” Every time he took a step towards me, “Leave me alone, leave me alone, leave me alone.” Then he turned his attention to another woman who was standing at the crossing. “And leave her alone, too! Women do not want to be harassed by you!”

I crossed the road to the deli and went to buy my food, and when I got to the register he was standing there. “That guy just tried to attack me!” I shouted. “And another woman, too!” He laughed, and told the cashiers I was crazy. “They know I’m not crazy!” I replied, “I come here every day.”

He was taken outside and continued to loiter there, while the deli staff talked about calling the police. “It’s one thing to have men shout things at you on the street,” I said. “It’s another thing to have them grab you.” A college-aged woman who was eating in the shop came over to offer to walk me home, and I accepted her offer.

It was a scary experience - especially since it happened so close to where I live – but it was also one that ultimately left me feeling more powerful.

I thought of all the times I had passively deflected in the similar situations. All the times I had walked past cat callers with my head down, hoping that if I behaved as if I hadn’t heard them they would disappear. The time that I sat in park in Paris reading a book an old man had leaned in as though to kiss me, and I had limited my protest not to words but to a raised hand and a shaken head. All the times when I hoped that strangers would pick up on my lack of interest in talking to them by my non-responsiveness, rather than simply telling them I didn’t want to be hit on.

Now, I don’t have time for that bullshit. I don’t know if it’s getting older, or being pregnant, or just having lived in New York for three years, but my patience for people who cross my personal boundaries is at an all-time low. I am less flight, and more fight.

Or at least, more ready to just outright say, “Leave me alone.”

When I first stayed with The Sex Myth founding director Hanne Larsen last May, these were the words that were hung above her desk: “Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.”

The quote — from Winston Churchill, it turns out — resonated with me immediately.

I had told my young cousin, who was working towards a career as an actress, that she should be prepared to face failure after failure on the road to achieving her dreams, but that it was only through persisting through those failures that anyone found success. And I knew from experience that even the things we think will finally make us feel like we’ve “made it” don’t always feel that way when they actually show up in our lives. Neither success nor failure are final; both are just temporary conditions.

The Churchill quote has been on my mind again recently, as I’ve prepared to launch the next iteration of The Sex Myth play and movement into the world.

And here, I take a quick break from our scheduled straight-from-the-heart, uncomfortably honest essay to ask you to join our movement and contribute to our crowdfunding campaign: https://startsomegood.com/the-sex-myth

Over the last couple of weeks, as I’ve reached out to friends and colleagues to ask them to support the play, I’ve received some lovely messages from people in my life, many of them along the lines of, “I’m so happy for you” or “I’m so proud of how much The Sex Myth has grown.”

To which my internal response has been, “But the project is not actually a success yet. I am just throwing myself out on a terrifying precipice trying to make it one.”

Launching a new project is exciting and filled with possibility. But it also means staring the possibility of failure in the face. And in the case of running a crowdfunder, as my friend Erin Bagwell wrote on her blog Feminist Wednesday last week, it means staring the possibility of failure in the face for 30 days.

But to get back to Churchill for a moment, I think it’s this willingness to stare failure in the face that matters most.

Launching a book or a play, running a successful crowdfunding campaign, earning enough money to pay the bills without institutional support or a salaried job — none of these things are easy.

But it’s not the lines on a resume or the achievements you put in your bio that matter.

It’s the courage to continue that really counts: to keep going to auditions, to keep writing and revising even when no one is reading what you’ve created, to keep talking about whatever social issue you care about until you convince other people to care too.

And that’s the true measure of success, I would argue… even if a lot of the time it feels like the opposite.

Besides, as the huscat pointed out to me last night when I talked to him about this, a lot of this project already has come to fruition — even if, to me at least, it feels like everything hangs in the balance right now.

The playbook exists, ready to help people around the world put on their own productions, and we already have people in six communities and four countries talking to us about putting on the show. We have dates and an awesome venue for our New York show in August. We’ve spent the last six months creating a fantastic suite of products to help people get involved in the movement. And in less than 18 hours since we went live, we’ve raised more than $3000 from 40+ contributors.

You can learn more about The Sex Myth play, what we’re doing with it, and why it matters at https://startsomegood.com/the-sex-myth

And please, if the project resonates with you, help us get it off the ground by contributing and joining our movement.

PS If you’re in NYC, join us for our launch party in downtown Manhattan tomorrow night. More info and RSVP link here.