How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong

by Elizabeth Day

failed to understand, at the time, that people-pleasing was never going to be a fulfilling way to live. That in pleasing others, you end up failing to please yourself.

I have evolved more as a result of things going wrong than when everything seemed to be going right. Out of crisis has come clarity, and sometimes even catharsis.

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.

‘Who cares what other people think? When you’re on a desert island and you’re on your own, struggling to survive, will you give a fuck what someone else thinks? No! You’ll be too busy trying to make a fire with a magnifying glass and waving down a passing ship so you don’t die.’

that in order to succeed on a grand scale, you have to be willing to fail on an equally grand scale too.

At home she had been raised to be strong-minded and to test unnecessary boundaries and yet she was entering a place where rules had to be obeyed.

In other ways, my twenties did not live up to the hype. I had envisaged an age of carefree light-spiritedness, in which I would finally be able to do what I wanted in both work and play.

My twenties were a constant juggle between adult responsibility and youthful impulse and often I felt as though I was failing in both areas.

That was the thing about my twenties: it was meant to be a decade of experimentation, but sometimes the experiments taught you nothing other than that you shouldn’t have done it in the first place.

There was a pressure to conform to the tidal wave of non-conformity.

The truth was, at the age of twenty-two, I didn’t have enough confidence in myself or my own opinions not to let incidents like this get to me. My sense of self was unmoored, at the mercy of any passing gust of wind. This was the age where my people-pleasing kicked in to a higher gear. 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.

I lost myself in the rush to be part of a couple.

It felt like an extended metaphor for the whole decade: that shifting tension between where you wanted to be, where you thought you should be and where you were right now.

I remember my twenties being a decade in which no one talked – not really, not honestly – about the things they felt unhappy about or the stuff that was going wrong in their lives. It was, instead, ten years of trying to put on a good show – for yourself and for anyone else who might be watching. It was ten years of moving forwards while groping blindly for the point of it all; ten years of building a career but feeling impatient at the lack of pace; ten years of wondering who you were meant to be dating and how you would find the mythical right ‘one’; ten years of casually assuming you had all the time in the world while knowing you were running out of it, to the extent that turning thirty seemed to me to be a giant cut-off after which I would never be truly young again.

We are half child, half adult, with a foot in both camps. We lack the innocence and irresponsibility of childhood but most of us don’t yet have the skills to navigate adulthood because our identities are still being shaped.

I was impatient for everything to be sorted and I didn’t realise that your twenties are a time of transition, of flux and that being in the change is the point of them.

Many of us will have similar stories: your twenties are often when you first come face to face with mortality, with the sense that all of us are, to a lesser or greater degree, running out of time.

Because however much you might feel you’re failing at your twenties when you’re living through them, they are a necessary crucible.

We waste far too much time imagining why the other person is acting the way they are, rather than focusing on what we can do to make ourselves happy and meet our own needs.

But at its worst, people-pleasing is actually a deeply selfish attribute. It means you aren’t honest about who you are. At its worst, it means you’ve never worked that out; you’ve just lived your life around the contours of other people, squeezing yourself into the remaining space.

apart. I folded myself into ever-smaller squares, diminishing myself to such an extent that I would have no needs to place on the person I was meant to be sharing everything with. I lost my capacity to express how I was feeling. At some points, I didn’t even know what I was feeling. My thoughts became mutable things, slippery as fish. I was frightened of what would happen when I pulled on the single loose thread of my own uncertainty in case everything else unravelled too.

‘Twenty years of joy and support and friendship, that’s a success,’ he muses. ‘Twenty years of anything with another person is a success. If a band stays together twenty years, it’s a miracle. If a comedy duo stays together twenty years, they’re a triumph. Is this night a failure because it will end in an hour? Is the sun a failure because it’s going to end in a billion years? No, it’s the fucking sun.’

We fear that how we look is going to be judged by those in power and be found wanting. We fall into the trap of competing with other women, comparing our bra sizes and our waist measurements and whether or not we have a thigh gap, without realising that the seeds of this entirely pointless division have been sown by years and years of institutionalised misogyny. In that context, the most revolutionary act is actually to be happy with yourself.

‘the kind of signals that we’re sent from a very, very, very young age about how perfect we have to be and how failure isn’t really an option if you’re a woman. How you should be incredibly ashamed if you do get things wrong. There’s such a template of what a woman should be:

It showed me that sometimes you need to pay attention to your gut just as much as your logical brain, and that making brave decisions gets easier the more you flex the muscle of your emotional resilience.

Everyone wanted to be friends with this paragon of all that was good and right with the world. Even I wanted to be her friend when I wasn’t busy pretending I didn’t.

Friendship is not a finite resource. It can expand and flex, depending on the generosity of the friends involved.

The second was the realisation that friendships can change and evolve and mutate. They are not ever-fixed anchors in the seabed of your life. They are plants that need watering and re-potting and a specific set of conditions to flourish.

The challenge is taking friendship personally enough to invest your time and affection into it, but not so personally that you feel an emotional vortex when a friend goes through a different phase or wants to hang out with someone else for a while.

Most importantly: a friend doesn’t owe you anything. A friend has not made a commitment, has not signed a contract or walked down the aisle and promised to love you until death do you part. A friend does not need to do anything or be anyone in order to make you feel better about yourself. Of course, the greatest friends do this anyway, but it is not their job and you should not expect it of them.

Connection and compassion seem to me to be the things that enrich our human selves and make us different from other animals. It’s also what will be remembered of us long after we’ve gone: not what our bank balance was, but what we were like as a person; the happiness we shared, the love we spread, the friendships we valued and nurtured.

The truest advice is given only when asked for, because the act of asking means your friend is willing and ready to receive it.

The other key to not failing in friendship is the simple act of being there.

The older I’ve got, the more I’ve realised that friendship cannot be measured by the act of doing anything specific; it’s simply about sharing what life throws at you – the fun, brilliant stuff; and the difficult, knotty stuff – and standing by someone’s side when they feel most alone or vulnerable or sad or fearful.

We just slipped right back into our relationship like a pair of comfortable socks, and I know that, whatever happens, Susan is going to be in my life forever.

When you have tried and failed to have children, you become aware of how much parents take their offspring for granted. They will bitch about them in a humorous way and talk about their pelvic floor exercises and how their sex life is ruined and how demanding their children are, and of course this is as it should be, in the right context and the right company. But it was a singular experience hearing these words from the male fertility consultant who had been treating me for seven months.

‘And we just kind of made peace with it. Of course, the world around didn’t make peace. A lot of people … rather than seeing it as a failure I think a lot of people said, “Oh, it’s such a shame because you’d make such good parents.” It’s enough for me. As you say, it’s like having it all-ish. And that’s kind of what I’ve got. I’ve got the good career. I’ve got … You know, I know what makes me tick, which is nature and solitude and my dogs, and I have a really good marriage. And that’s kind of enough for me. And it is life, it’s sacrifice, you don’t get to have it all, you just don’t. And if you can make peace with that then you’re probably going to be happier down the line.’

I think some parents (by no means all of them) create a narrative around having children that disguises the fact they might wish they hadn’t.

wish I could explain to you the magical feeling I get from knowing myself so much more fully as a woman, having been able to spend time really understanding the world around me, while also being able to sleep in at the weekend, go to the cinema whenever I want and have breasts that are not required to lactate on demand, but I’m afraid I just can’t. You really have to go through it yourself, you know?’

I’m being flippant but there is a more serious point, which is that society has a long way to go until it treats the child-free with as much respect as it does the parent.

There is so much advice, and so many opinions about how you live your life, and it is doled out in a way that I would never dream of doing on the topic of, say, someone’s parenting skills. It’s almost as if, in being child-free yourself, you become everyone else’s child: someone who needs taking care of, who needs guiding in the right direction, who doesn’t quite understand, but bless her, she’s trying.

In truth, I do not see my failure to have babies as a personal failure at all. If anything, it is society’s failure for making me feel I’ve not met some invisible standard. Perhaps it is my failure to have allowed that opinion to affect me. But as for the random, extraordinary collision between the right sperm and the right egg at precisely the right time in my biological cycle? I can’t be held responsible for that.

I’ve found groups of three tricky to navigate, as I always worry that the other two people will like each other more than they like me.

The flip side of this grit is that I am ferociously independent. I do not want to have to rely on anyone else because the thought of ceding control over my life to others is a source of anxiety.

Angry at him for what I perceived as betrayal. Angry at men for never being ‘ready’ and having the luxury not to be, while women, whether they’re ready or not, are biologically designed to get on with the business of having children while also having to juggle careers and busy lives. You think women are magically ready for babies at the precise time their ovaries kick into gear? You think we’ve got our salaries and houses and career paths in perfect alignment before we remove our coils or stop taking the pill? Of course we don’t. But neither do we have the freedom to dawdle around and ensure every tiny thing is in place beforehand. Men can do that.

When women are angry it’s been considered unfeminine, or a character defect.’ In other words, when women showed their anger, it made them un-women.

For so long, we women have turned our anger inwards, redirecting it towards ourselves and allowing it to manifest as shame. We have told ourselves, instead, that we are sad or hormonal or stressed, but these have been placeholder emotions. And for so long, we have been encouraged to do this by a misogynistic culture that realises female anger is dangerous not because it is the product of mental imbalance but because it is fuel. Female anger is power.

If anything, acknowledging my anger made me more sane. It made me realise that anger can be a transformative force for good. It pushes you to challenge injustice rather than simply swallow it. It brings you face to face with your own potency. The result was that I felt unquestionably more myself.

When I looked anger in the face, it was no longer something to be frightened of but something I could focus and distil into motivation. It became, if there is such a thing, a calm and steady fury: a hinterland of rage on which I could build a different future; one in which I wasn’t trying to be anything more acceptable than the thing I already was. One in which I wasn’t seeking to deny the experiences I had been through.

Perhaps this, ultimately, is the key to succeeding better at rage. It is to redirect its destructive energy into something creative, which gives voice to what we’re actually feeling rather than what we’re pretending to feel.