I’ve been thinking a lot lately about failure. About the way we decide what constitutes a failure, about my own failures and what I should take from them. Should I even call them failures? I mean they almost certainly are, I did fail to keep my job, I did fail to maintain this relationship or that, I have failed to be earning £100,000 a year and own my own home by age 25. There are lots of things I’m still waiting to see the results of, will they be more failures? Or are they just things that were not meant for me or things that just didn’t come to pass?
I failed to get into Oxford. That is a fact and no amount of ‘I wouldn’t have liked it anyway’ disputes the fact that that decision was out of my hands and did not go in my favour. Seven years after this event though, it doesn’t feel like a failure in the emotional sense, just something that did not happen. Knowing I feel this sense of distance, and indeed, that I felt it as early as when I went to a university that did accept me nine months later, gives me a lot of comfort.
I was lucky enough to be surrounded by people who did not make me feel like this was a failure. Shout out to my parents who tell me at least once a year that all I need to do to make them proud is to make sure I’m happy. It’s definitely their way of telling me to chill the fuck out. Another huge thank you to everyone who has ever taught me for being incredible mentors and continuing their support long after it was their job to do so. Except my Year 10 maths teacher, who openly hated me, no thanks for you hun.
The thing about trying your best is that it’s terrifically boring. Having to sit down at make myself write this blog every week will be an enjoyable chore. Learning Arabic, using a new development platform at work, trying to figure out how the hell to format these blog posts - all of that gives me at least a couple of hours a week of just wanting to pack it all in and lay face down on my bed. I’ll talk about social media at some point but I quite obviously do not post photos of me sending messages to my boss which read ‘kill me I’m so confused’ but they are numerous and props to her for sticking with me through those moments. I have been very blessed to have a situation where I can roam and be in beautiful places but that would mean nothing to me if I wasn’t being challenged.
No challenges = no doing my best.
It would be easy for me to characterise the last few years as a cacophony of failures. Sometimes I do, like when I’m surrounded by the contents of my suitcase and clinically tired because I’ve been up at 4am to catch a flight to Greece and it feels like even being here is just a way to kill time because how could I even hope to make this work? Then I went for a walk by the sea that I’d been so excited to be near, and I unpacked, and slept for ten hours, I sat at my new desk and got back to work. I feel better now, combined with new place nerves, there is an underlying excitement at what the next six weeks will bring to me.
I’m a huge fan of these failures (sometimes, and only ever in retrospect), not only because they taught me to calm the hell down because no matter what you do, things can and will go wrong. Also because they have, over the course of time, shown me that what I want to be is someone who tries and then just keeps on trying. Giving everything a bloody good go is literally all I can do and I hope I always live my life like that. It also makes the failures easier to take because I know that if I gave something everything I had, and still didn’t get the result I wanted, it was never for me to have.
You might not subscribe to ‘everything happens for a reason’ and to be honest, neither do I on a general scale. In the words of S Club 7 though - it is helpful for me to feel like ‘things are sent to try you and that how you respond and get up and try again is the actual definition of who you are. In accordance with this, I listen to a lot of interviews with people who do many different things - and a lot of podcasts in general. I will list recommendations below but this helps give me perspective on how long the road to where I want to be could be and also how no one ever feels ‘done’ so I should calm the hell down.
My second top tip for remembering that I should focus on the trying and not obsess over the result, is to take part in something so much bigger than myself that I can only do a very minimal amount but that I am not in any way responsible for the outcome. Volunteer! Campaign! Do shit like that because oh gosh is it life-affirming to care about something that doesn’t always benefit you directly but you can still have an impact on.
In the wake of the election I will definitely feel better for having spent rainy mornings and evenings handing out leaflets and knocking on doors. Knowing that at least I did the best by what I believed and went out there and talked to proper people about it - proper people who did not agree with me but who I want the best for anyway.
EDIT: and it looks like, in a lot of ways, this actually worked. I think? Who is even forming the government? No one knows!
*****
I’m on Twitter - @clairegillesp - it’s just Labour party memes pals, and it’s gonna stay that way for a while.
I’m on Instagram - clairegillesp - which will be heavily populated with photos exploring my new home for the forseeable future.
I’m listening to Hello Friend with Bethany Rutter, The High Low, and also Our Man in the Middle East with Jeremy Bowen which is very good & episodes come in at a very manageable 15-20 minutes.
xx
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