Joanna Barnard's Blog, page 8

So why women?

I’m going to start with a potentially career-limiting confession: from January I will be leading a project for which, in many ways, I wish there wasn’t a need. A women’s writing group. I’ve already…

Source: So why women?

Childhood dreams and Moomins: how writing things down changed my life (and it’s not how you think)

At the age of 9, I won an international writing competition and as a result, had a story published. Nearly 30 years later, the same thing happened again, albeit on a larger scale (the first was a short story, called A Journey Through Time, published in an anthology; the second was my novel Precocious, published in 2015 by Ebury).

 

That’s a really long gap, but something happened in between, you see: I grew up.

 

Now that I’m a mum, I’m struck every day by the extraordinary creativity and self-belief of children. My son, who’s 6, strongly believes he can grow up to do and be whatever he likes (even if his most fervent wish, currently, is to join the Ninja Turtles). When I was not much older than him, I started to write stories and my dream was to become an author.

 

And then life got in the way. I did an English degree, and a Creative Writing masters, but I also got a job, a house and bills to pay. Life brought many exciting and wonderful experiences, but my dream receded.

 

In June 2012, I woke up on my 36th birthday to this epiphany: ‘I don’t want to be 40 and still have the same kind of life’.

 

I was divorced with a small child and disillusioned with the career that had once brought me satisfaction (not to mention a very good salary). The idea of making drastic changes was terrifying, but the four years until I turned 40 seemed like a reasonable timeframe within which to start doing things differently.

 

At just the right time, a lovely friend (and mentor) came to see me and helped me to formulate my vague wishes and dreams into what became known as The Four-Year Plan. We bought a notebook in which to document the plan, and I chose deliberately: a hardback book with a Moomin on the front.

 

The 9-year-old me, you see, loved books and used to read Finn Family Moomintroll aloud to her mum (along with the Secret Seven, but I couldn’t find an Enid Blyton notebook, sadly). I wanted to recapture that 9-year-old’s dreams, and the certainty and clarity that little girl had about what she was going to be when she grew up.

 

Within the pages of the Moomin book, I started to write down, in a vague way at first, all the things I might like to do. Write (this was always top of my list, although I still didn’t believe at this point that anyone would ever pay me to do it). Help people. Teach, maybe. Within a few months I’d written down what I thought the 40-year-old me might have become. It reads: Writer. Counsellor. Doula.

 

So crucially, as I turned 40 in June this year, where am I now?

 

I’m a published author with one book in the world, another ready to be published next year, and a third germinating in my little brain. I’m in the final year of a psychotherapeutic counselling course. I’m not a doula, but I have qualified as a hypnotherapist and as part of this I offer hypnobirthing, so I’m helping pregnant women in that way. From January next year I will be leading the So:write women’s writing group in Southampton.

 

I don’t think any of this would have ‘come true’ without me writing it down. Now, I’m not particularly spiritual, I don’t believe in ‘sending wishes out into the universe’ and that kind of thing (I haven’t even read The Secret). But something happens when you write down your dreams, goals, call them what you like. They become real, somehow. You’re making a commitment to them. You’ve got a reminder, in black and white (especially if you revisit them often, which I recommend). And if you’re good at detail, it helps to break down the plan into yearly, monthly, weekly chunks. Make the dream part of your to-do list. Do one thing, however small, every day, to get you closer to where you want to be.

 

In the wake of something wonderful, people often say ‘I never dreamed this would happen’. That’s rarely true. No-one ever won the lottery without buying a ticket.

 

So my advice is buy the ticket. Hold onto your dreams. And, with or without Moomin help, write them down.

 

 

 

If you don’t climb the mountain, you can’t see the view

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a blog post about failure after pulling out in the early stage of a 3 Peaks Challenge. I vowed to return to Ben Nevis (my Ben Nemesis, if you like) to tackle it at my own pace and without the threat of two other effing great mountains at its heels.

‘The mountain isn’t going anywhere,’ I wrote. True, it was still there nearly 12 months later, although they did add a metre to its official height (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35837773). Bloody typical.

Mum, a keen walker, wanted to complete the challenge too, so we made our plans, booked guest house, flights, hire car…and soon the week of the walk was upon us. I was nervous. Would the weather, notoriously changeable in the Highlands, thwart us? Would one of us take a tumble and get injured? Would I just be exposed as unprepared and ridiculously unfit? I couldn’t bear the thought of failing again.

What is it in the human psyche that makes us want to climb mountains, anyway? Who first looked up at the Himalayas and thought ‘Let’s get our boots on and have a crack at those’?? (I also often wonder who it was who first looked at a lobster and thought it was a good idea to try to eat it. I salute them, though, I bloody love lobster even if it does require tools). The truth is, there’s no reason to do it. There’s no practical purpose. We climb the mountain because we can, because it’s there (as Mallory said of Everest). There are the physical and psychological benefits of being outside, of exercising, but you can get quite a lot of those on a good long walk somewhere flat. So there must be something about moving upwards – reaching something – getting to a peak, literally and metaphorically.

Now I realise that walking up Ben Nevis is not a particularly outstanding achievement in the grand scheme of things. It’s reasonably common: over 100,000 ascents are made every year, most of them via the Pony Track. Certainly on the day we were there, there seemed to be thousands of us. So I’m not writing this to get any pats on the back (although kudos to my mum, I don’t know how many people in their 60s do it). I just wanted to capture something about the process, and what I learned from it.

Suprisingly, I found the first section the hardest. This is probably physical to a degree – your muscles and joints are warming up, your body getting through the ‘Eh? What are you doing to me? An hour ago we were cosy in bed’ phase – but surely mostly psychological. When you know you’ve got probably 4 hours of climbing ahead of you, and you’ve done, ooh, ten minutes and your knees are hurting, holy shit it feels like this was a bad idea.

What’s more, whereas with some mountains (like Snowdon), you feel like you gain height quickly, with Ben Nevis the zigzag path means that the first third just feels like a slog with very little reward. It’s pretty enough but you’re waiting a long time for the really spectacular views (see picture). Here I am, I thought, on a mountain that feels like a bloody great rock-covered metaphor for life.

Then about 3,000 feet up I had an epiphany (or possibly mild altitude sickness): it’s a metaphor for writing, too, and a good one, not one of those you have to really shoe-horn to make it fit.

See, I’m trying to write a third book (I find I always say ‘I’m trying to write…’ rather than ‘I’m writing…’ What’s that about?). Not really sure if anyone cares if I do or not, but I’ve set myself the challenge and even if not a single soul ever reads it I’m going to write it. Because that’s what I do. (Back to: because it’s there).

And I realised on the mountain that STARTING IS THE HARDEST BIT. You can’t imagine, at the start, that you will ever, ever finish. Be it 80,000 words or 4,000 feet: it just seems too momentous. You can’t think about the end. You can’t even see it (especially if you’re a ‘pantser’ like me and you don’t even know the ending when you start – gulp) – so you just put one foot in front of the other, and keep doing it, because the only way is up.

Over Summer we watched the charming ‘Finding Dory’ and I love her mantra ‘just keep swimming’. So simple and so helpful when things get a bit rough. Just keep walking. Just keep writing. Keep moving forward and sooner or later you’ll see the view.

As for past ‘failures’, I remind myself of Edison saying ‘I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work’. I’ve learned from the last two books and I hope I’m getting better. I found a way to climb Ben Nevis that didn’t work for me and then I found a way that did.

Of course, the peak is a bit of a false ending. It’s momentary joy before you contemplate the less rewarding trudge back down (admittedly the beckoning pint at the Ben Nevis Inn was a good motivator). It’s well-known that most hiking and mountaineering accidents happen on the way down (read or watch Touching the Void for a spectacular example – and for an unforgettably inspiring story). Going down is the real work.

Bear with me if I do, here, get out the shoe-horn while I relate it to writing, but it works for me. The peak is ‘I’ve finished! First draft done! Woo hoo! I have a book!’ Well, that’s great, have your sandwiches and your flask of coffee (laced with a tot of whisky if you’re like us) but then get ready because there’s a hell of a lot of work ahead.

Editing is the downward trudge. Here’s why:

There are no bloody surprises. YOU’VE SEEN ALL THE SCENERY BEFORE.
It uses different muscles and it’s often painfully slow.
You’ll feel good when you get to the end but not quite the delirious ‘I’ve achieved something’ good that you felt at the top. What you’ll feel will be more like relief.

But hell, who cares, because right now I’m still on the ascent. In fact I’ve barely left base. I have very little idea where I’m going, to be honest, but that’s okay.

The point is, I’m going. I’m going and I’ll just put one foot in front of the other.

 

Last word to George Mallory, writing about Everest:

‘If you  cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the  challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is  the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t  see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for.’

 

 

Watching my son in the barber’s chair

I don’t know what it is. Something about

the set of his shoulders, the curve of his neck, but

he’s suddenly older. A far cry from the baby who

wriggled and wept as the scissors snipped

round his ears, he sits in sombre silence, eyes fixed

on the mirror. I watch the back of his head.

From time to time he pulls a hand out from under

the black cape (“like Batman!” I’d cajoled hopelessly once,

waving the comics and sweets brought as bribery),

brushes away a stray hair from his nose or chin,

the briefest movement, because he knows to stay still.

He still turns, though, from the heat of the dryer.

At the end, she takes a mirror and shows him the back,

as she would with a man, and he nods,

in a sage sort of way, for all the world as though he’s had

in his short life a hundred haircuts, some good, some bad.

40

So last week I hit the big one. 4-0. Life begins, so they say (which leaves me wondering what exactly I’ve been doing for 39 years and 364 days).

And as much as I tried to tell myself a birthday is just a day, an arbitrary measurement really, just another revolution of this little green planet around a big fiery orb, it did feel like a milestone.

So why exactly is 40 such a big deal? In a happy coincidence, while I was planning this blog, this weekend’s Observer ran a piece by Miranda Sawyer on her own ‘mid-life crisis’. In it, she talks about ‘death maths’: ‘if you were born in the UK between the late 60s and late 70s, and you’re a man, then all the research says that your life expectancy is 80. If you’re a woman, it’s 83.’

That’s it, then, isn’t it? 40 is a roughly-midway point. And people are prone to ‘crisis’ at this point because it just doesn’t seem long enough, does it? I mean, I don’t even remember the first few years, which seems a bit of a jip, to be honest. Quite a bit of my teens and twenties is now a blur (damn you, Diamond White).

So I thought I’d review just the last decade, and see what I’ve been up to; where I was at 30, and where I am now. (As Ferris Bueller said, life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.) Turns out quite a bit has gone on.

In the last 10 years, I’ve: got married, got divorced, had a baby, moved 240 miles south, left my sales career, had a novel published, started studying, and lost a parent. Phew. No wonder I’m tired. The last decade has really been about change, not all of it anticipated, or wanted.

 

If I’m to focus on any one change, the pivotal event of my thirties was becoming a mother. And becoming a mother was – still is – about adjusting.

Adjusting to the massive and immediate wake-up call of those life-changing blue lines.

Adjusting to being a new mother amid the reality that it didn’t ‘come naturally’ as so many people said it would; that in fact, in those first few months especially, it was exhausting, frustrating and sometimes (whisper it) boring. That it was a role that would tap into my Fear Of Failure more deeply than any other activity imaginable (even skiing), and that this terror would never, ever let up.

Next, adjusting to being a single mum and well and truly learning what it means to put your child’s happiness and wellbeing ahead of your own.

And more recently, adjusting to being a mum who works a little bit less and in a more flexible, but less secure, way, and consequently earns a lot less and worries more about the future, the trade-off being more time with my son (that time being already a scarce commodity, see divorce, above; his dad and I have what I call ‘shared ownership’).

Becoming a mother has been the highlight of the last decade, for me, no doubt about that. But it’s not everything, and it’s important more people say that out loud. Being a mother has (hopefully) made me more sensitive to the choices and lack of choices that other women make and have. I respect those who maybe could have children but choose not to, I sympathise with those who would love to have children but cannot, but above all, I recognise that it’s none of my damn business to pass comment on it either way.

 

In some of the conventional (mostly materialistic) ways we measure success in our society, I suppose I’ve gone backwards in the last ten years. 30-year-old me had her own house and drove a swanky BMW; 40-year-old me is firmly in the rental market with no foreseeable way out and drives a Ford Focus. Ten years ago I was engaged and planning a wedding; today I’m on my own and can’t quite decide whether I really like it (when I make a list of reasons it would be nice to have a boyfriend, ‘someone to put the bin out on a Monday night’ is disturbingly high up) or am just too bruised by experience to let someone in.

But I’m also proud of some of the changes I’ve made, and the way I’ve handled those changes that were somewhat forced upon me. Forgive the clichés but I find that these days I genuinely care more about people, but less about what people think of me. I’m confident in my own views but (I hope) not so intransigent that I can’t listen to others. I accept my wrinkles and wobbly bits and am grateful for good health.

And while I honestly plan to do more ‘adulting’ from now on (early nights, drink more water, take my makeup off and hang up my clothes before bed), I happily saw out the first week of my 40s jumping up and down to the Stone Roses at the Ethiad back in Manchester. Right before this joyful 90-minute regression to my youth, The Courteeners, one of the support acts, reminded us ‘You’re not nineteen forever’.

My mental response? Exactly 50/50 between ‘That’s what you think! Just watch me drink vodka and scream my lungs out to ‘Waterfall’!’ and ‘Well, thank the flying spaghetti monster for that’.

Which I think is a perfectly appropriate reaction for a 40-year-old.

 

 

It feels

These days, my dad sits in his chair, shrivelled and yellowing, like a leaf curled in on itself, waiting to die.

He was jolly, once. Whisky drinkers often are. Red-nosed and big-bellied back then, he made everyone laugh. I drank with him.

My mother rattled around in her tacky jewellery, a chattering stick of a woman. She ignored me, mostly. This turned out to be a kindness: I couldn’t miss her when she was gone. I stole her pills.

A procession of experts tell me how to stop. Social workers, doctors, counsellors. They bully, cajole, ask pointless questions.

They ask me why I do it and I laugh at them. I don’t know what they’re looking for. They present me with other options, paint pictures of their idea of a better existence. I don’t want it, I don’t want it, my insides scream out.

They think they can frighten me but I stare death down every day.

They ask me why I do it but no-one has the sense, or the balls, to ask me how it feels.

It feels like falling and flying and being perfectly still, all at once.

It feels like arms around me.

It feels like love.

When is a thing finished, anyway?

A week ago I finished my second novel.

 

There have been other, false, endings. The first draft. Hahaha. The fact I ever considered it anywhere near finished at that point makes me laugh.

The second draft, even, when ‘It’s finished’ really meant ‘I’m finished’. It meant ‘I can’t do this any more, it’s not you, it’s me’.

But this time is different. I’m sure there will still be additions, subtractions and tweaks suggested by wiser people than me (namely, my agent and editor), but just now, it does actually feel finished. It feels like a book. The End feels like the end. And with that comes all sorts of odd emotions.

I attached the file to an email, hit send and then I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d feel relieved but relief was at the bottom of the pile, squashed into near-insignificance by a raft of other feelings.

 

There are things about this book that I am only now recognising. How much of me is in it, for starters. How emotional a process it has been (in a way, I think of Precocious as more of an intellectual exercise than this one, but that could be down to the distance of time). The demons I’ve exorcised.

But above all, it hits me that I’ve lived with this book for over a year (quite a few years, really, since the idea first started germinating). That’s the thing about writing: even when you’re not writing, you are. Even when the thing isn’t physically in your hands, it’s with you. And as with many relationships, it’s only now it’s gone that I realise how big a part of my life it’s been for the last 15 months.

 

Precocious was different. I didn’t write it to any kind of deadline, no-one was waiting to read it. I didn’t know if anyone would ever read it. Although I wrote the first draft quickly, I had years to tinker with it before it eventually went out into the world. My experience with the second book has been more intense, not least because I made it my actual job for a year, not something I just squeezed in late at night whenever I could muster the energy (although in reality that’s how much of it was written: old habits etc.).

 

Nowadays I have a few other jobs. When I leave my waitressing shifts I go home and take nothing with me (apart from sore feet, sometimes). Even as a therapist, my work with clients can be ongoing over several sessions, but the sessions themselves are limited to 50 minutes. And then I go home. I think about the work, yes, but it doesn’t live in my head all day and night, doesn’t walk alongside me the way that writing does. Writing is the best job in the world, but it is literally nonstop.

 

So how to know when a thing is ‘finished’? Is it ever, really? Between the second and third versions of this book, I’ve added close to 15,000 words and done a lot of shaping. That’s a fairly big edit. How do I know there aren’t another 15,000 in my head somewhere that just haven’t been excavated yet?

 

I’ve been trying to find the source for the following story, and can’t think for the life of me where I first saw it, but I’ll paraphrase it for you while acknowledging that it isn’t mine:

 

A man wrote a book. It took him ten years. At the end of the ten years, he looked at his finished work, and at himself, and he realised that he was not the same person as he was when he began it. So he changed it. The next draft took him another ten years. At the end of the ten years he realised he was not the same person and the book didn’t reflect who he now was, so…you guessed it. On, and on, and never finished.

 

I suppose part of the reason it can be hard to let go is there is always an alternative ending, always a different version, an idea of what could have been.

 

In this respect, the books we write are a bit like relationships. Sometimes even when they’re finished, they’re not finished. My relationship with my ex-husband will never be truly finished because we’re bound by our son. I ‘speak’ to him (albeit mostly brief texts) almost every day. Maybe more than I speak to anyone. That’s weird, when I think about it. There have been other relationships I’ve had to finish unequivocally to protect my emotional health, but they still linger in the shadows of memory, so are they ever really over? There are people we are never quite finished with because they have taken away a little piece of our hearts. They are part of us.

 

So are our books.

 

So I’ve started to think about it a bit differently. One of the lovely things about having Precocious out in the world has been the realisation that it doesn’t belong to me any more. (That’s one of the hardest things, too, but mostly lovely). I’ve been to book groups and heard almost as many different interpretations, feelings, responses, as there have been people. This has made me realise that as a writer, your job is simply to take the book as far as you possibly can. The reader will take it from there. And from there, there are so many places it can finish up. That’s the most exciting part of the journey.

 

 

 

 

Grown-up cups and plates

 

I don’t normally write about motherhood on my blog, but I was prompted to do this after my son, on Saturday morning, drank from what he called a ‘grown-up cup’, ran his own bath and then informed me, with some satisfaction, that he doesn’t need me any more.

 

This post comes with a bit of a warning. As a rule I try to resist making my little boy my only topic of commentary on social media, even though in reality he dwarfs everything else in my world in the manner of some benevolent 5-year-old giant. Occasionally I document some of the funny things he says (a recent favourite was when he misheard ‘inset day’ as ‘insect day’ and proceeded to refer to it as ‘bug day’. Who knows what he thinks the teachers are up to on these days? Fumigating? Show and tell with their pet millipedes and spiders?), mainly to communicate with family who might be interested, and in a way to curate him for myself.

 

But generally I find people who go on about how much they love their kids a bit, well, boring. And obvious. My inner response tends to be: I should bloody well hope you do love them! To my mind it’s a bit like announcing to Facebook that you breathe, or that you didn’t torture any bunny rabbits today. Of course you love your kids.

 

So with this admission in mind, I apologise if I veer towards the sentimental, the obvious, in this post. I guess you don’t have to read on. Anyway, back to Saturday and the thought train his little comment set me off on.

 

Now, my son is five. Obviously he does need me, quite a bit. Nevertheless, his announcement caused my eyes to prickle a little. Because every day I’m simultaneously delighted by his little steps towards independence, and saddened by them.

 

Motherhood is a series of these dichotomies. One by one you put away things that you think you’re glad to see the back of: nappies, dummies, the moses basket and later, the cot, ceremoniously replaced with the ‘big bed’. But each milestone is bittersweet. Even as you’re celebrating the new person they’re becoming, you’re saying goodbye to the baby they were.

 

For example, now that my son can read, his voracious appetite for books and comics brings me, a lifelong bibliophile, immense joy and pride. But it’s another job he doesn’t need Mummy for. So I bring increasingly challenging books to bedtime each night in a pathetic effort to ‘big up my part’, but he either gets bored and asks where the pictures are, or starts sneakily skipping ahead, reading aloud whole sentences on the following page.

(What’s more, I can no longer get away with, after a long day, reading only the first line or two on each page and skipping through a book – although to be fair, he got wise to this ruse pretty quickly; long before he could read, he was memorizing whole Julia Donaldsons and would correct me if I got a single word wrong. The bugger.)

 

There have been lots of things written about ‘last times’, in terms of childhood, some of them touching, many of them close to mawkish. But their message is consistent, I think, and it’s what occurred to me this weekend: pay attention.

 

On Christmas morning, at 5am (ugh – I know – but he was awake and I had no chance of coaxing him back to sleep, as he knew the night had brought not just Santa but, almost as enticingly, Nana and Granddad), before the frenzy of paper-tearing, Lego-building and chocolate-eating began, my son and I lay in his bed together, momentarily calm, heads touching, whispering. And it occurred to me: He will never be 5 years old on Christmas morning again. Blindingly obvious, I know, but what can I tell you? It was 5am. I squeezed him, smelled his hair as I often do in the manner of some desperate, wistful admirer being allowed to embrace her idol, and took the time to really listen to his early-morning chat, his hopes for the day ahead, and to feel the shape and weight of him, which would never again be precisely what it was in that moment.

 

Some people call it mindfulness, I guess. Living in the moment, being aware of where you are right now, being grateful. It can be hard as a parent, when the days hurtle past in a blur of feeding, cleaning and picking up after small people whose very purpose is to outgrow you. I suppose that blur is the reason I wanted to pause for a moment and write this blog.

 

I don’t believe I’ve run my son’s bath, or read to him, for the last time. Not yet. But I suppose it will come (well, I hope so – if I’m running his baths for him when he’s eighteen, I won’t be giving myself top marks as a mother).

 

In the meantime, when he told me he didn’t need me, I told him I’m proud of him (as I try to every day) but that I need him quite a lot, still. He gave me a big hug, we high-fived, and then we ate breakfast together, on grown-up plates.

The Worst Christmas Present

It was a set of pans.

Oh sure, they were Le Creuset pans, in my favourite shade of turquoise, which would look great in our kitchen. I’d coveted them for months, and the whole set wasn’t cheap, I knew that.

But they were pans. As a gift, they meant something. I recalled when he used to buy me wildly uncomfortable underwear, all red and black lace, or perfume, or one Christmas, a surprise weekend in Paris. They were gifts that said I was sexy, glamorous, spontaneous.

Pans meant he saw me as a cook, a domestic servant, even.

He looked at me expectantly. I fantasised about smashing the largest pan over his head, sending brains and blood spraying out behind him onto the wall, his eyes still vacant and hopeful.

‘Well?’ he said, ‘Are you pleased?’ He looked at me more closely. ‘They’re happy tears, right?’ I only nodded and started to cart the dead weight of the present into the kitchen, where they, and apparently I, belonged.

 

Later, I overheard him on the phone, trying to keep his voice low.

‘It was the worst Christmas present ever,’ he muttered, and in that moment my heart started to swell. So he knew! He’d realised he’d got it wrong. We’d laugh about this in years to come. I hopped from foot to foot, waiting for him to hang up so I could cover him in a hug.

‘I mean,’ he said, ‘Golf clubs. What was she thinking?’

 

 

Not Peaking: Things to learn from failure

I don’t do failure well.

My first experiences of failure came in my late teens – the Oxford entrance exam, and my first driving test – and were quite a shock to the system.

This makes me sound a bit spoilt, life-wise, and there probably were smaller setbacks before then (I didn’t win in the finals of the Haven holidays talent contest, also a bit of a blow). But the real truth is my ‘success’ up to then was the result of two factors: I happened to be good at the main thing you get measured in up to the age of eighteen i.e. academia; and, crucially, I didn’t try things I knew I would fail at. As a rule, I still don’t.

It’s the reason I’ve never been skiing (I know I’ll be rubbish at it for ages before mastering it, which an inner voice tells me I never will, so why try?) and never done any serious running until a couple of years ago.

At the weekend I was part of a team aiming to complete the famous 3 Peaks challenge, and I fell at the first hurdle.

The 3 Peaks involves climbing the highest mountains in Scotland, England and Wales (Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Snowdon) within 24 hours (including driving time between the peaks). It’s a very, very tough challenge and only around 40% of people achieve the 24 hour goal.

It became obvious only 40 minutes or so into the Ben Nevis climb that I was considerably slower than the rest of the team and I made the decision to pull out so as not to hold them back.

People talk about ‘highs and lows’ and in those hours waiting for the rest of the team to return, sitting at the foot of that mountain, I felt very, very low. I was miserable. In my head, one failure got rolled into another: my career, my relationships, even my inevitable small (daily) failings as a mum.

I wanted to run away; get on a train and go home. Because failure does that to you – makes you feel you can’t bear to be touched by others’ success. But I’m glad I didn’t run.

During those hours of waiting, one of the things I reflected on was my experience as a writer and of being published. I thought back to everything I’d read, and written, about goals and realised I’d been continually moving the goalposts for myself. I don’t think I’m alone in this. You start off with the goal of finishing your book; next, all you want in the world is to find an agent. Got an agent? Great! Now you can worry whether you’ll find a publisher. But it turns out it’s not enough to be published, even though this was your dream since childhood; it needs to be a bestseller, get rave reviews, be made into a movie, and so on. The finish line, the line that represented happiness, didn’t exist. I had no time to enjoy successes because I was too busy looking ahead, looking for more.

I’d always considered myself a very positive person but I realised I am very self-critical and many of my less constructive habits – procrastination, I’m looking at you – result directly from a deep fear of failure. If I don’t write the book / submit the story, I don’t risk rejection. If I don’t enter into a new relationship, no-one can hurt me again. The walls are up.

Back to the weekend. I sat out Scafell Pike and, being ‘out’ of the challenge, I suppose I didn’t have to tackle Snowdon. But I did. We took the road less travelled, following the ‘Rhyd-ddu’ path, a route that started off easy and ended up hard, like a bloody great metaphor for life etched out of stone and topped with clouds. I made it to the top, and made it to the bottom, a small victory in the context of what my team-mates had endured and achieved, and therefore a bittersweet experience but one I’m glad I didn’t let myself miss.

I have to take responsibility for what happened, or rather, didn’t happen on Saturday. I hadn’t trained well enough. Will alone won’t get you up three big mountains at pace, or ensure you achieve your lifelong dream (otherwise all those X Factor contestants who cry “but you don’t understand how much I want this” would go on to win). Success requires hard work and there are no short cuts.

And failure? You can wallow, or you can learn from it. You can be proud and grateful for the things you do achieve. I try to tell myself the things I say to other people: If you even finish writing a book, you have achieved more than the millions who only talk about it. If you climb even one mountain, you are lapping the people on the sofa.

And you can always try again. Those mountains aren’t going anywhere.