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

by Elizabeth Day

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.

What does it mean to fail? I think all it means is that we’re living life to its fullest. We’re experiencing it in several dimensions, rather than simply contenting ourselves with the flatness of a single, consistent emotion.

Failure to fit in at an early age teaches us to develop a resilience that can ultimately help us flourish.

I thought that if I put enough time in, worked hard, did my best and if my parents threw money at any given problem, success would automatically follow. It was the logic of entitlement and I’m aware that countless people from different backgrounds, who have experienced discrimination for everything from their ethnicity to their sexuality, will find this a curiously slight example.

but because I thought success in tests was a perfect equation of effort multiplied by intelligence equals reward.

Succeeding at a test means not defining yourself according to the outcome. It means reminding yourself that you exist separately from those ticks in the margin and that most of life is an arbitrary collision of serendipitous or random events and no one is awarding you percentage points for how you live it.

In my imagination, after the success of my university years, this was going to be a halcyon period of my young adulthood.

‘Do you think that maybe, you’ve been through quite a lot already and been operating at a fairly frantic pace, and that perhaps this is a necessary time of reflection, of allowing the next phase to hatch?’

“You cannot script life. You cannot control life. And that you may decide that this is the narrative that most suits you now, but you can’t control that.”’

‘Your problem,’ he said, ‘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.’

It was just a feeling, I reminded myself. The anxiety did not define me and I was still me without it.

Is the sun a failure because it’s going to end in a billion years? No, it’s the fucking sun.’

And isn’t it so much more empowering to focus on what our bodies can do rather than what they look like?

If you treat yourself as high value, it turns out other people are more likely to do so as well. Because when you play big, it’s difficult to feel small.

For so long, we women have turned our anger inwards, redirecting it towards ourselves and allowing it to manifest as shame.