The F Word

5 minute read time

I thought about beginning this feature on failure with a quote, but ironically, there are simply too many inspiring words about defeat to choose just one single expression. From iconic intellectuals such as Einstein and Beckett to orators of our time like Oprah and Obama, everybody has something to say about the righteousness of getting it wrong.

Just this morning, I was scrolling through Instagram and two posts about making mistakes appeared back-to-back on my feed. One from designer Joanne Hynes, who, in her inimitable style, has created a traditional Aran jumper with a mixed-media embellished slogan that reads ‘My mistakes made me’; the other from the fascinating American psychologist Adam Grant who explained that: “...one of the most basic truths about success [is that] it’s not how many times you fail, but how much you learn from each one.”

I don’t disagree, but failure can only really be viewed in a positive light with the benefit of hindsight and some sort of subsequent win (unless you’re an extremely well-adjusted individual). The writer whose novel has been rejected 17 times isn’t celebrating each rebuff as a stairway to literary heaven. He or she will only regale others with the virtues of their misfortunes once the paperback is in every bookstore shopfront.

I remember reading an interview with author JK Rowling in the very early days of her success. The narrative being presented by the journalist was a kind of fairytale rags-to-riches story – it’s well known now that Rowling was a single mother on social welfare when she wrote the first Harry Potter book. Rowling’s unromantic response was simply, “I didn’t know there would be a happy ending”.

In other words, as she sat in her London flat, punching away the farfetched story of an English boy wizard on a traditional typewriter, the memory of previous blunders, of past errors, brought little comfort. The high to make sense of the lows hadn’t arrived yet and there was no guarantee that it would. But as a best-selling author worth more than €1 billion, every step – and more importantly misstep – in Rowling's past looks like an essential piece of the jigsaw puzzle that is her wildly successful life.

Similarly, author, podcaster and failure ‘expert’ Elizabeth Day wrote in the introduction to her 2019 memoir How To Fail: Everything I’ve Learned From Things Going Wrong, “Each time something has gone wrong, it has led me to where I am meant to be, which is right here, right now, writing this introduction. I firmly cling to the belief that the universe is unfolding exactly as is intended…” Of course these thoughts were expressed on the back of her incredibly successful podcast, which in fact gave rise to the memoir; it was written after a triumph rather than the series of tragedies she experienced preceding it.

Besides menopause and a greater sense of our mortality, past mistakes are the great equaliser among midlifers.

We’ve all made them: big, small, professional, personal, financial, familial. But how do we avoid being plagued by them if we’ve yet to complete and make sense of the jigsaw puzzle of our own lives? The journey from gaffe to gratitude can be a long one and is often besieged by feelings of regret, which is a potentially all-consuming and debilitating emotion.

I have many regrets, from minor misdemeanours like once congratulating a woman I hugely respected on being pregnant when she wasn’t (...yes I did) to major mistakes such as buying an apartment at the height of the property boom. It’s so easy to get caught up in a cycle of shame and blame peppered with those persecutory but pointless ‘If onlys’. I’ve learned that this is because we often view our past in absolute terms – “I shouldn’t have done that”, “I made a big mistake” – without ever wondering what the real outcome of not having made those particular choices might be.

Cognitive behaviour therapist, Windy Dryden, interviewed by The Guardian in 2019, believes, “There is a tendency with regret to see the pathway you didn’t take as inevitably better than the pathway you did.” She describes this way of thinking as “toxic regret”, but explains that, “Regret based on flexible attitudes is the hallmark of mental health.”

It’s so easy for me to imagine myself living in a bigger property with a much smaller mortgage had I not bought when I did. But given that I’ve had a very unstable professional life since the recession hit 12 years ago, perhaps the actual consequence of not having signed up to that mortgage would be that I’d still be renting, or far worse (for me), house-sharing.

When the immediate consequences of your mistakes cause real hardship, it’s difficult to embrace the philosophical argument that there are benefits to your blunders, but one positive I know has come out of my real estate fiasco is a greater empathy with others. Intelligent people make poor decisions all the time because as humans, we are not only influenced by cold, hard facts. Our fears, insecurities, aspirations and personal circumstances all play into how we choose the paths we take in life.

Many of us will have to accept that, unlike Rowling and Day, there won’t be any Hollywood-worthy happy ending to our own story. After nearly 14 years of homeownership, I have about a tenner’s worth of equity in my property and an interest rate that remains one of the highest in the country. That’s just how it is, and I doubt I’ll ever have an epiphany in which that decision to buy in 2007 suddenly makes absolute sense to me.

But an article on thriveworks.com, an online counselling and therapy site, explains that “As an imperfect person, you will make mistakes in life. You will have regrets.” It sounds so obvious, yet as individuals, we put so much pressure on ourselves to be better than that, and when we’re not, we remain chained to our past, with all its hurt and heartache. The article suggests an obvious, but still excruciatingly difficult, answer to this: forgive yourself.

Self-forgiveness is as difficult as self-love, something some of us Heyday writers explored in a recent article. It’s as if we’re hardwired to be tough on ourselves. Is this particular to Generation X? I don’t know, but I see it so often among my midlife friends and peers that I think it must be a hangover from growing up in the eighties when we were taught we could ‘have it all’. How could we not feel as if we’ve failed when having it all was the benchmark of success?

If I’m being honest I never aspired to have it all. But I didn’t think I’d fall quite so short of the mark either. But there I go again, with my whipping boy whingeing when in fact the only way forward according to Thriveworks is to, “let the past be the past...stop beating yourself up...banish guilt and shame...and accept and respect yourself as you are.”

I think redefining success is an important part of self-forgiveness too, and I like Winston Churchill's interpretation: “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” That doesn’t sound like a bad place to start, does it? Let’s see where we go from there.