didn’t expect. But almost as soon as the hot-water bottle is in my sister’s grip, the cap loosens and cold water pours out all over her pyjamas. She wails and the sound is worse than the crying that came before it.
‘It’s c-c-c-cold!’ she stutters, glaring at me with incomprehension, and my mother starts stripping the sheets and telling her everything’s going to be fine, and they both forget that I’m standing there and I feel a swelling of acute shame in my chest and a terrible sense of having let down the person I love most in the world when I was only trying to help, and I’m not sure what I’ve done wrong but I know this probably isn’t, on reflection, how hot-water bottles are made.
My sister recovered from chicken pox, no thanks to me, and I learned in the fullness of time about boiling kettles and waiting a few seconds to pour the hot water carefully in through the rubberised neck, tightly winding the cap back on after you’d pressed out the excess air. I also learned that even if your intentions are good, the execution of a task can sometimes be lacking if you don’t have the necessary experience. This is one of the most vivid recollections of my childhood: clearly my failure to help when I most wanted to made a big impact on me.
It wasn’t actually a big failure, or an exceptional one, but then failures don’t have to be notable to be meaningful. As I got older, I would experience greater failures, which were harder to come back from. I failed exams and a driving test.
I failed to make the boy I liked fancy me back.
I failed to fit in at school.
I failed to get to know myself properly in my twenties, existing in a succession of long-term relationships where I outsourced my sense of self to another person.
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 failed at a marriage and was divorced by thirty-six.
I failed to have the children I always thought I wanted.
I failed, over and over again, at playing tennis with any degree of confidence.
I failed to acknowledge big, difficult feelings such as anger and grief, preferring instead to mask them with easier, more pliable emotions like sadness.
I failed by caring too much about the unimportant stuff and things I could never hope to control.
I failed to speak up and find my voice when I was being taken advantage of at work and in my intimate relationships.
I failed to love my own body. I fail still. That is a constant work in progress, but I love my body more than I used to and I am grateful, now, for the honour of inhabiting this miraculous, functioning thing.
Self-acceptance is, I believe, a quietly revolutionary act but for years I failed even at that.
Along the way, I loved and I lost. I had my heart shattered. I changed jobs. I moved houses and countries. I made new friends and shed old ones. I endured breakdowns and break-ups.
I grew older. I came to understand myself better. I finally understood the importance of spending money on wheeled suitcases and winter coats. As I write this, I’m approaching my fortieth birthday, which is older than my mother would have been in that early memory of hot-water bottles and sisterly devotion. And if I have learned one thing from this shockingly beautiful venture called life, it is this: failure has taught me lessons I would never otherwise have understood. I have evolved more as a result of things going wrong than when everything seemed to be going right. Out of crisis has come clarity, and sometimes even catharsis.
In October 2017, a serious relationship ended. The break-up was unexpected and brutally sudden. I was about to turn thirty-nine. Two years earlier, I had got divorced. It was not an age at which I had anticipated being single, childless and facing an uncertain personal future. I needed, in the language of modern self-help culture, to heal.
So I went to Los Angeles, a city I return to again and again to recharge and write. It is a place where I breathe more easily in the certain knowledge that the sun will probably shine again tomorrow and the eight-hour time difference means blessedly few emails after 2 p.m. I was ghostwriting a memoir for a political activist at the time, and although I felt vulnerable and flayed of a layer of skin, I would spend my days assuming the voice of a strong woman who knew exactly what she thought. It was an interesting dichotomy, returning to my own uncertain self after a day at the laptop, giving expression to this woman’s forceful and eloquent beliefs. But it helped. Gradually, I began to feel stronger as myself too.
It was while I was in LA that I first had the idea for the How To Fail With Elizabeth Day podcast. I’d been downloading a lot of podcasts, because listening to music post break-up made me feel sad, but listening to nothing made me feel alone. One of the podcasts I subscribed to was the renowned relationship therapist Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin? in which anonymous couples agreed to be recorded as they discussed their issues. Perel would prompt and cajole and sensitively offer her insights, and I was gripped by the way in which her clients would reveal their most vulnerable and intimate selves. At the same time, I was having conversations with my friends about heartbreak and loss and tapping into their stores of accumulated wisdom.
I began to think about what it would be like to do a series of interviews with people about what they had learned from things going wrong. If I examined my life, I knew that the lessons bequeathed by episodes of failure were ineffably more profound than anything I had gleaned from its slippery shadow-twin, success. What if other people felt the same way but were too afraid to talk openly about it for fear of humiliation? But what if this was a conversation we needed to have, in order to feel better about ourselves and less isolated when life didn’t go according to plan?
We live in an age of curated perfection. On Instagram, our daily posts are filtered and framed to shape the impression we want to give. We are assailed by a constant stream of celebrities sharing their bikini-body selfies, of self-styled clean-eating gurus telling us which quinoa grain to eat, of politicians posting pictures of all the great things they’re doing in their constituencies, and it can feel overwhelming. In this bubble of smiling, happy people, littered with laughing face emojis and showering heart gifs, there is scant space for meaningful reflection.
That is changing: nowadays on social media, it is easier to find those admirable people who are endeavouring to be open about their struggles with everything from body image to mental health. But sometimes that can feel just as manipulated as the rest of it, as if honesty has become simply another hashtag.
And then there are the opinions. Endless, noisy opinions, generated at the click of a Tweet button. As a former journalist for the Guardian Media Group, which was one of the first newspaper organisations to allow online comments that were not kept behind a paywall, I can personally testify to the amount of aggressively opinionated internet bile that exists out there. During my eight years as a feature writer at the Observer, I was accused of everything from having sand in my vagina to not understanding the difference between misogyny and misandry, and being employed just because I was a woman or had some shadowy nepotistic connection to the powers that be (I didn’t). If I ever got something even slightly wrong – because I am human and occasionally, writing to deadline, an error might slip in that was not spotted by sub-editors – there would be a baying rush towards instant condemnation. Of course I should have got my facts right, every journalist should – but the outcry felt disproportionate to the offence.
In
