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

by Elizabeth Day

I 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. That in doing so, you are trying to shore up your dwindling internal confidence by collecting the positive opinions of others, without realising that this never works; that it is the equivalent of ignoring a fire-breathing dragon by lighting a candle from its flame.

You simply can’t date a man who tells you all about his exercise regime in excruciating detail and then quotes post-modern poetry in the same sentence.

Allowing yourself to be open to love and to sadness, to joy and to discontent, to intimacy and to detachment, to the triumph of possibility over all the things that could go wrong – this is the only way for me that feels real.

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.