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.

I thought my twenties were going to be spent in similarly low-lit bedrooms, where I would burn a perfectly judged stick of soft jasmine incense and have a great piece of contemporary art casually slung on the wall. In the mornings, I would be hungover from the wild night before, but hungover in a messily attractive way, like a girl in a music video with tousled hair.

The truth was, at the age of twenty-two, I didn’t have enough confidence in myself or my own opinions not to let incidents like this get to me. My sense of self was unmoored, at the mercy of any passing gust of wind. This was the age where my people-pleasing kicked in to a higher gear. 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 got to the stage that if a boyfriend asked me where I wanted to go for lunch, I became paralysed by indecision. I didn’t want to tell them where I wanted to go in case they preferred somewhere else. After a few years of this, I genuinely no longer knew what I wanted to eat anyway and so actively needed someone else to make the decision. I lost myself in the rush to be part of a couple.

Two things struck me about this answer. One was Faulks’s sense that he ‘ought’ to be feeling a certain way and doing certain things in his twenties. The other was the significance he attributed to change, at a time when many of us are negotiating not only salaries and rent deposits but relationships with partners and families too. We are half child, half adult, with a foot in both camps. We lack the innocence and irresponsibility of childhood but most of us don’t yet have the skills to navigate adulthood because our identities are still being shaped.

‘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.’

I know men struggle with body confidence too, but I do also believe that centuries of conditioning society to assess women according to their looks or sex appeal and to objectify them in order to sell products or be artists’ muses or to dance provocatively at a pool party in a music video or to be silent, pretty bit-part players on a stage where all the speaking parts are taken by men, means that women are especially prone to giving themselves a hard time over their appearance. For us, it never is purely superficial. We fear that how we look is going to be judged by those in power and be found wanting. We fall into the trap of competing with other women, comparing our bra sizes and our waist measurements and whether or not we have a thigh gap, without realising that the seeds of this entirely pointless division have been sown by years and years of institutionalised misogyny. In that context, the most revolutionary act is actually to be happy with yourself.

‘I realised the extent of my internalised misogyny when I realised last year that every time I go to the gym and I see another woman working out I will always look at how long she’s run for … And if I see that someone has burnt twice the amount of calories as me in 10 per cent of the time I will immediately sort of hate myself and think that I’m this embarrassment and I shouldn’t really be in the gym and what’s the point of working out? ‘You know, I sort of hate the woman [as if ] just by being there she’s sort of boasting and lording it over me. And then if I see that I’ve done even fractionally better than another person, I feel incredibly smug. ‘And this is not a conscious thing, you know, I had to really catch myself and I was like, “Oh, you do this with every single woman in the gym!” And if you feel like you’ve succeeded more than another woman, even though in your conscious, compassionate, rational mind you know that none of that matters, something in me gets this real kind of kick of, “Oh, I’m doing better than her,” and it’s horrible when you realise that. And I think a lot of the journey is just kind of catching those thoughts.’

And isn’t it so much more empowering to focus on what our bodies can do rather than what they look like? My friend Jenny K has some interesting thoughts on this. She’s the mother of two young children and when she went to visit her sister recently, they decided to go swimming. Her sister, also a mother, was agonising about having to wear a swimsuit given her post-natal belly and the fact that she hadn’t gone for a bikini wax. ‘And I just thought, where did we get this shame from?’ Jenny K said. ‘Our bodies have given birth to children! We’ve got pubic hair because we’re not prepubescent. Who was it who told us we had to be ashamed of these things rather than celebrating them?’

It seems so strange now to remember a time, not that long ago, when as a twenty-something in the early 2000s, it was perfectly acceptable for me to shave the edges of my pubic hair for the sake of neatness and leave it at that. Nowadays, I have a wax every three to four weeks and as I do so, I try not to think of the fact that hairless genitals are associated with pre-pubescence and I try not to wonder what that means about why porn films so often feature them and why we’re subconsciously being fed the message that this is what grown men want to see.