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

by Elizabeth Day

One step at a time. Fill up your heart. Fight on.

‘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.’

And it’s better, I believe, to have opened up my heart and had it broken than never to have had the shimmering, incalculable, unrepeatable experience of being in love with a unique individual at a unique, never-to-be-repeated time in your life.