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

by Elizabeth Day

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.

But 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. I, who had so many words, could not find the right ones when it came to myself. At the same time, I was desperate to please others in the hope that, by doing so, I would finally be granted the secret access code to belonging. So I shaded my character according to the company I found myself in.

rejection was not necessarily a personal indictment of who I was, but a result of the infinite nuance of what the other person was going through, which in turn was the consequence of an intricate chain of events, shaped by their own experiences and their own family dynamics and past relationships, that had literally nothing to do with me.

Relinquishing control and making yourself vulnerable – these are terrifying things to do,

The alternative is to shut yourself off from the world and from your experience of it. It is to build defensive walls against life’s difficult and contradictory nature, but also against its capacity for beauty and connection. Sometimes the difficulty and the beauty are entwined, and you can’t get to one without experiencing the other because you won’t be able to recognise or value the good stuff for what it is when it comes along.

In truth, the early dating phase is when I exist in a constant state of hyper-anxiety, wondering what the other person is thinking, and metaphorically prodding at the corners of their brain to test where their boundaries lie. What I’m trying to do, I think, is control the uncontrollable: I’m trying to subject someone to a subconscious interrogation of their motives and beliefs in order to protect myself against the inevitability of their letting me down. And I’m trying to do all this while appearing super-hot and breezy and nonchalant and unavailable-but-just-the-right-level-of-available and funny and smart and unlike any woman he’ll ever have been with before.

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. Ultimately, we are all unfathomable mysteries to each other. We are unpredictable and nonsensical and irrational and there is no box-ticking exercise you can possibly devise that will tell you whether or not you will get hurt. 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.

There were other things that my dating failures taught me: the incontrovertible value of kindness, for instance, and 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.

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. The strongest people can afford to be vulnerable and retain their dignity.

‘To admit uncertainty,’ she writes, ‘is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s.’

The micro-rejections I experienced were a way of building up my strength and my sense of self.

‘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.’

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.

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 should have occupied the space, rather than believing it was up to someone else to tolerate my presence within it.

Life crises have a way of doing that: they strip you of your old certainties and throw you into chaos. The only way to survive is to surrender to the process. When you emerge, blinking, into the light, you have to rebuild what you thought you knew about yourself.

‘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.’

There are few better ways of keeping failures in perspective than muttering ‘It’s the fucking sun’ under your breath

It’s the fucking sun

If I have learned some practical things from my past, finite relationships, then it’s to be clearer about what I want, and to know that this clarity can only come from knowing myself. It is to have faith that I have the answers within me, if I can only take the time to find them, and not to look for someone else to complete me, to provide the solution to an ultimately unknowable question.

That there is no one on this big, wide planet who can understand the you-ness of you more than you. That you should protect yourself by respecting that, but at the same time, not be overly defensive. That it is a waste of energy building walls against armies that do not yet exist. That real strength comes from owning your vulnerability and expressing your emotions in a way that is true and calm and powerful.

how else I could have got to know myself, if not through my intimate interactions with the world, through my relationships with others? We do not exist in a vacuum. We exist in rhythms and melodies that can be harmonious or jarring or syncopated, played in major or minor chords, but the music has to be heard to make an impact. Sound becomes sound by bouncing off other surfaces.

it means realising that the accumulation of wisdom from having been on this earth longer each year is a deeply lovely thing.

Age is not weakness; it is the opposite. It is the evolution of self-knowledge. It is profoundly powerful.

‘It’s more real to fuck up,’ Emma told me. ‘You don’t have to try to be better than you are, because who you are already is why I love you. The real you. Not the you where you are pretending to be someone and tailoring all your needs just to make other people happy.’

Friendship can give you the ultimate security of feeling known, seen and cherished as you are. At its simplest, making a friend is a process of finding out more about someone else, and therefore finding out more about yourself.

Angry at how dignified I’d tried to be in the aftermath of the break-up, never once shaming myself by giving vent to my feelings or letting him know how badly I’d been hurt, how wounded I was.

‘The best revenge is living well,’ a male friend said to me at the time and I nodded my assent and carried on being reasonable. But the effect of my self-containment was to allow this emotional bruise to darken without any retribution. The effect was to allow this kind of behaviour to continue without making it clear what the cost of it had been.

The effect was to replace my rage with silence. The effect was a failure to acknowledge my true feeling, which was furious indignation, not weepy acquiescence. The effect was not to realise I was angry. Really, bloody angry.

An angry woman is seen as shrewish, unlikeable and out of control – a harpy at the mercy of her dangerously inexplicable emotions. An angry man is often seen as righteous, masculine – a powerful male archetype who uses his fury to defend and protect.

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.

More often, I’d cry when I felt a deep unnameable emotion I couldn’t quite understand and I would fail to see it for what it was.

For true progress to be made, women need to be allowed to be many different things all at once. The same goes for men. We do not have to make sense according to some objectively constructed notion of what is ‘male’ and what is ‘female’. We can be fluid and contradictory. We can be women who understand our anger, who refuse to mask it with other emotions, at the same time as understanding that power also comes from friendship and solidarity and thoughtfulness. Tenderness is not the same as weakness.

When I finally allowed myself to understand my anger, it turned from hot to cold. I’d been worried that anger belonged to my darker self; that by unleashing it, I’d become a bad person. But that didn’t happen. 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.