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July 13 - September 22, 2021
women are more likely than men to form strong emotional memories of negative events or to ruminate more over things that have gone wrong in the past.
in order to succeed on a grand scale, you have to be willing to fail on an equally grand scale too.
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.
As a twelve-year-old, my need to camouflage myself by belonging was at its most pressing. I didn’t want to stand out. I wasn’t sure enough of myself yet to risk forming a new teenage identity of my own and until I figured that out, I simply wanted to be one of them.
I wanted to change and to blend in, and yet I had no idea how to pretend to be someone else. In fact, there seemed to me to be something fundamentally dishonest about even attempting it. I was living in a society where there were so many different versions of the truth and where danger lay in the silent, shifting gaps between these truths, that at the same time as wanting to fit in, I also had an innate desire to hold on to the one thing I knew was me: my voice. I was a conflicted, unhappy mess.
the detachment from my own hurt meant I gradually lost touch with what I was actually feeling, which meant that this became difficult to express.
school is not simply a place where academic lessons are taught but also a place where we educate ourselves on who we are; where we can try out different identities and see what fits before the constraints and responsibilities of adulthood are upon us.
Failure to fit in at an early age teaches us to develop a resilience that can ultimately help us flourish.
In 2018, the charity Childline reported delivering 3,135 counselling sessions on exam stress in the previous year, with half of those phone calls being with twelve- to fifteen-year-olds, some of whom spoke of ‘an overwhelming workload’ and ‘worries about whether they would get the grades they want’.
The sheer number of exams – from SATs to GCSEs to AS and A levels and beyond – means that, at some point, you will probably fail at least one and your sense of self risks being reduced to a series of red biro marks on foolscap and a percentage point informing you that you haven’t passed.
Tests are never just tests. They tap into all sorts of deeper issues too.
When you’re a grown-up, life becomes bafflingly free of signposts. There is no exam board telling you whether you’re doing well or meeting the necessary requirements for being a twenty-five-year-old. There’s no one who can give you an A* for moving house efficiently or managing to file your tax return on time. Sure, you can be given promotions and pay rises, but these are often scattered and random events. There is no long, anticipatory build-up of revision to an eventual climax of essay-writing against the clock as an invigilator walks up and down between rows of desks and tells you that you
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I was even fairly good at the trumpet – as long as I didn’t have to take a test (I managed Grade 6 before realising there is nothing more stressful than a music exam which requires you to stand in front of a stranger, regulate your shallow breathing, and blow loudly into a brass tube blindly hoping to hit the right note and realising there is nowhere to hide if you don’t).
These socially sanctioned successes had led to a belief that I could do things I set my mind to because – let’s not mince words here – I was spoiled. I was white, middle-class, had attentive parents
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.
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.
For someone who spent her twenties in a series of long-term relationships this was terrible logic. I would contort myself into varying degrees of discomfort simply to fit in with someone else’s life, someone else’s desires.
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.
The awkward silence was part of the therapy. It was about making me feel comfortable with being uncomfortable.
‘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?’
we’re not fixed at the age of twenty-two, twenty-three, that life is long and you can try things for a while and if they don’t work out, do something else’.
despite all my internal self-doubt, I did actually have reasonable instincts and that perhaps the key to dating successfully was not allowing those instincts to be drowned out by anxiety-generated examination of every minute signal the other person might or might not be giving. That, really, the most important thing about dating was to remember who I was, not to try and work out who the other person was or what I could do to gratify them.
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.
the need for someone to do what they say they’re going to, rather than simply woo you with lots of lyrical verbiage that means very little when the shit hits the fan.
I believe that for all my failed dates and relationships, I have finally learned how to be authentic.
The strongest people can afford to be vulnerable and retain their dignity.
The micro-rejections I experienced were a way of building up my strength and my sense of self. As soon as I started viewing it like this, I realised I was fine on my own. In fact, I felt empowered being who I was, with the love of my friends and without an urgent need to settle for a romantic partner who wasn’t going to add to my life in any meaningful way.
‘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.’
when you’re running, the physical pain overtakes the emotional pain, that’s my theory.
learning how to fail at sport resembles learning how to fail at dating: success in both is predicated on not taking failure too personally, but instead in parsing it into what you can change from what you want to change, from what you should change in order to perform better.
I would eventually not be able to do other things too, and that I should make the most of everything.’
I was confusing the notion of having it all with the feeling I should be doing it all. In my rush to be the perfect girlfriend, as well as the perfect professional, I hadn’t taken the time to work out what I wanted from a relationship.
I tried to be what Gillian Flynn so brilliantly describes in Gone Girl as ‘the cool girl’. I shrugged it off.
no one else will ever know the truth of your life, just as you will never fully grasp the truth of theirs.
The report concluded that taking on what was deemed ‘office housework’ (that is, non-revenue-generating work such as filling in for colleagues or organising an office party) could actually harm your career prospects.
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.
my default response when things go wrong is always to turn reflection inwards and believe it’s something I have or haven’t done, or some quality that is fatally lacking in me.
The truest advice is given only when asked for, because the act of asking means your friend is willing and ready to receive it.
At consultant level, men outnumber women at many of the UK’s leading fertility clinics.
What happens when, having worked hard and got the requisite number of lucky breaks, you find yourself successful and it doesn’t feel quite as you’d imagined? 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? In other words: what happens when you fail at success?
not being able to understand how I wasn’t happy and yet all my dreams seemed to be coming true. And that’s what depression is. And people think that it’s a mood, and it’s not, it’s something else. It has nothing to do with your surroundings, in that you could have everything, but you could still feel like that.
