A Novelist and Podcaster Gleans Lessons From Failures
Elizabeth Day was divorced by 36. Moreover, she ‘failed’ to have the children she once wanted. She failed a driving test. She’s had a litany of failures – big and small, significant and trivial – that most of us are likely to have racked up, if we have merely succeeded at surviving for as many decades, or even fewer. But Day also realized that her failures had granted her something precious, something that even her grand successes might not have accorded: “If I examined my life, I knew that the lessons bequeathed by episodes of failure were ineffably more profound than anything I had gleaned from its slippery shadow-twin, success.”
Given that we inhabit a contemporary global culture, in which success is often defined in narrow, material terms and measured by the kind of metrics – wealth and fame – that feel unreachable for most folks, it’s unsurprising that Day’s book and podcast on failure are hugely popular. In an instagrammable world, where one is expected to project a certain kind of effortlessly glamorous and consistently buoyant persona, failures – the large, messy, emotionally-scarring ones – are treated like private mishaps that befall only the unlucky few. Even if vulnerability is increasingly viewed as a badge of honor, especially after Brene Brown’s viral TED talk, the manner in which one must fail, is given inadequate social thrust.
Failing to Fit In As A Child
Well before confronting her adult failures, Day had started contending with the distress of being ostracized. As a child, she felt like a misfit at school. She was English in Northern Ireland, at a time when the two countries were in the throes of a bitter conflict. Belonging to a disliked colonizing power can be discomfiting for anyone, more so for a child who has no sense yet of why he or she is being despised. “I became used to not belonging,” says Day. “I was the weird, ugly English girl with bad clothes.”
But there was a silver lining to such isolation. As Day observes, not fitting in can make you more independent and resilient. Many writers, have spoken about not feeling like they wholly belong to particular groups. This helps them develop “rich internal worlds,” to compensate for their loneliness.
In her podcast interviews, Day realized not fitting in as children was often woven into the childhood experiences of career comedians and performers. Many emerged from military families, with frequently transferable jobs; consistently being a ‘new kid’ forced these people to “crack jokes or act the class clown.” They either had to adapt to their hostile environments or channelize their suffering in creative directions.
Academic Stars Can Also Suffer Later
We’re all familiar with the downsides of school tests. Poor test takers might question their own abilities and forgo opportunities to reengage with the material, in different ways.
What we pay less heed to is the downsides of testing for the top rankers. As Day observes, even kids who are academic stars at school are not likely to keep receiving external validation from other dimensions of life. Also, the show of confidence that rests merely on academic stardom, can often be more fragile than it seems and can mask other insecurities that life is likely to expose at some point or the other.
As Jesse Burton, the author of The Miniaturist puts it, “In adulthood, no one gives you marks for getting the answer right.” You don’t get any golden ribbons or pats on the back for doing the dishes or filing your taxes or paying your bills. While there are promotions and scattered social rewards to climbing in your career, these are far less frequent.
Contending with Rocky 20s
Day did well academically at Cambridge University. She expected then to have a rather halcyon time during her 20s. She thought she would be like the characters in the TV show, This Life, wherein she would belong to the cool crowd, gliding through the years with enviable ease. It did not help that there was so much cultural baggage about one’s 20s. It was portrayed as an age filled with hedonistic experiences, a time to live it up, since one was done with education and not yet tangled up in adult responsibilities. “The reality didn’t quite match up,” says Day.
She had a full-time job at The Evening Standard. She was reporting for a column called Londoner’s Diary and the job involved attending parties filled with celebrities and gleaning interesting or scandalous tidbits about their lives. By most standards, this felt like a dream job, but Day wasn’t enjoying any of it.
She was also at a stage in her life, where she was a desperate people pleaser. “Like many young women, I mistakenly thought that the best way of feeling better about myself was to get other people to like me and to attempt to survive on the fumes of their approbation.”
Later, during her podcast interviews, she realized that many other people had also struggled in their 20s. Day herself tried to forge a long-term romantic relationship and a fulfilling career, but failed at both.
Failing at Relationships
When Day got divorced at 36, and re-entered the dating scene, she realized that the relationship landscape had changed significantly. One of the positives was that many more people were going online, and the chances of meeting reasonable people through apps were vastly improved.
Of course the sheer quantity or availability of “eligibles” doesn’t make it easier to find the right partner. When the author Dolly Alderton decided, at one point, that she was finally ready to restart dating, she thought she was radiating a certain message to the world: “I’m here, I’m ready. Here I am, world – throw me a man.” Did the universe respond appropriately? Of course, not. The first two men she met were a letdown. In other words, Life seemed to be hurling back her readiness at her, with a snarky: “You cannot script life. You cannot control life.”
At one point, Day even considered an agency who might help with some of the filtering. However, on reviewing the potentials inside a ringbinder, she quickly dismissed that notion. As a positive, Day suggests that “failing in dating is a necessary precursor to working out what you want and finding someone nice.”
Retrying Sports
Though Day was compelled to start tennis lessons as a teenager, she was always mediocre at the sport. When she retried tennis lessons again at 25, Day felt like she hadn’t gotten much better. Her American coach, Brad, however imparted a valuable lesson: “Your problem is that every time you miss a shot you dig yourself into a pit of self-loathing out of which it’s impossible to climb. You need to brush it off and be thinking of the next shot.” Later in life, she actually discovered other sports that she enjoyed, like Yoga and running.
The author Sathnam Sanghera was sent to a private school, where the fees were higher than his parents’ annual income. As a result, he slogged at his studies and was known as a nerd. Buying into the stereotype, his teachers never expected him to excel at sports. So he didn’t. But much later in life, he actually discovered that he was a very good runner. The lesson he culled from this:”…just because other people think you’re going to be a failure it doesn’t mean you will be.”
When Success Is a Letdown
When Day interviewed the actor, Robert Pattison, he acknowledged how insecure and anxious he continued to feel, despite or even because of his fame. “What happens if, on paper, you’ve got everything you want, but inside there’s a lingering sense of something missing: an emptiness you can’t admit for fear of appearing ungrateful?” Many celebrities that Day interviews admit to failing at “success.” The actor Simon Pegg, after he had landed what felt like a marvelous role in Mission: Impossible, felt strangely empty in the midst of his success. Pegg says: “I think it is important for people to know that these fabled material things aren’t necessarily the key to any kind of happiness.”
Realizing that, sooner rather than later, is perhaps the only kind of success that counts.
References
Elizabeth Day, How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong, 4th Estate, London, 2019