A love letter to (some of) my failures

Buckle up, readers. This one's a long and bumpy ride.

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They say you should never meet your heroes. But two weeks ago, on a blustery Sunday, with one of my best friends, I did exactly that. And it was amazing.

If you’ve never come across the indomitable Elizabeth Day, firstly - where on earth have you been for the last two years? And secondly - look her up, read her stuff, buy her books, listen to her podcast. They really will change how you think about failure.

I won’t repeat Elizabeth’s wisdom here (you do have to hear it from her) but I am going to borrow the format of her hit Podcast “How to Fail with Elizabeth Day” to explore a few things that it would be an understatement to say I’m uncomfortable with. Each week, Elizabeth asks someone in the public eye to name and examine their top 3 failures. When I started writing this newsletter, I had planned to tackle all three in one go. As I’ve written, I’ve realised that each of my three are so intrinsically linked to who I am and how I think about life, that they need their own space. And I need to give them that space, in order to really consider what I have and can learn from each of them. So consider this the first of a three-week instalment. I hope you enjoy reading about them; I’d love to hear your comments.

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My first failure is my failure to stay in a career I hated. I’ve always set myself high standards (I avoid the term “perfectionist” as it seems like such a humble brag), so when I landed a graduate job in a high-flying City law firm, I wanted to smash it. My family were super proud, and I was relieved to have found a job. I didn’t need to be the best lawyer in the firm, (I’ve never been especially competitive with other people, only myself) but I did need to feel I was good at it.

The problem was, I was awful at it. And I mean really, truly, I’ve-had-a-very-bad-appraisal-and-I-don’t-know-why-they-don’t-fire-me awful. The lovely thing about being a trainee in a City law firm is that you get to move departments every few months, meaning every 4 months I had the wonderful opportunity to be really awful ALL OVER AGAIN. And be told every four months in my reviews how awful I was. It was simply the longest two years of my life. And guess what? I wasn’t offered a job at the end of it. I didn’t want the job at the end of it, but I still felt crushed. “But what did you learn from it?” I hear you cry. Well, honestly, I didn’t feel until recently that I had learned anything at all, apart from how truly awful I was. I wasn’t good enough. I failed.

But I’ve listened to a few good people recently, and read a few good things, which have made me (slightly) rethink.

When I break it down, I only really failed to get a job I DIDN’T EVEN WANT ANYWAY. A job I wouldn’t ever apply for. A job I would run, screaming, away from. It didn’t mean I had failed at, as the wonderful Daisy Buchanan calls it, “careering”. I was only 25 years old, but I was broken, jaded and totally disillusioned. I spent the next few years in various jobs, until I fell pregnant and had the most wonderful excuse for not working anymore. Problem solved!

Well, not so much. Turns out, once you’ve stopped being pregnant and having a child so young that you forget how to be a proper person, there’s a period when you feel like you might just want to do something other than wipe bottoms, and blearily watch CBeebies on repeat before you repeat the whole cycle by getting pregnant again, and again. I couldn’t just endlessly keep having babies to avoid the disaster (and joking aside, that wasn’t my main motivation for procreating) that was my career, so I ended up, 13 years down the line, with my three children all in school, and a tonne of expectation. “Ooh, what are you going to do with all your time now?” people gleefully asked, as if I was about to embark on a sabbatical to the Maldives. Which to be fair, after spending the last 18 months home-schooling (thanks, Covid), I pretty much was.

“Oh, you know, I’m not going to rush into anything!” I breezily replied, secretly panicking. These people didn’t know I was a Failure. They weren’t aware of my crushing inability to hold down one of the “best” jobs in the world (spoiler: whilst I’m sure many people love it, being a lawyer isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s not Suits, people.)

But the truth was, I wanted to work. I wanted to have a career, something that challenged me and made me think. Something to give me back some self-esteem. I’d danced around the issue of not having a career for 13 years and it was time to face it head on. I spent time on my CV (a horrifying task, at the best of times) and applied for a few things, painfully conscious of my 13 year gap in “experience”, and my perceived failure at my last go around. My lack-lustre approach reaped what I had sowed - a big, fat nothing. Not even a solitary interview. I was right! I was a failure! I knew I should never have applied in the first place.

A lovely, kind and generous friend (the same friend who cried when I got my first commission - if you don’t have a friend that will cry when you succeed - get one!) who also happens to be extremely successful, offered to have a look at my CV and applications, to see if she could guide me on what was missing. This conversation over coffee in her back garden turned out to be one of the most important conversations I have ever had, and was my gateway to giving myself permission to write.

To cut a long story short, this failure has taught me that you have to look at what it is that you want, what success means to you as an individual. I thought for so long that success would have been staying in that awful career in the city. Working those 90 hour weeks, earning a packet, and not having a life. I know, now, that I wasn’t an awful lawyer. There were some things I was really, really good at. It just didn’t excite me, it didn’t ignite my spark. Being an all-or-nothing kind of person, this felt like a failure to me. But it really, really wasn’t.

I’ll caveat all of this by saying I am aware of how incredibly privileged I am. In many ways. And I’ll also confess that I met my now husband at that City law firm. He’s a very happy, and very successful lawyer. For a long time, I felt like that made him “better” than me. After all, he is succeeding every day at what I had failed at. As I write more and more, my confidence grows, and that gap between us lessens. Plus, he admits that my job is way more interesting than his!

Back to that Sunday. After a fantastic talk, Elizabeth kindly sat for hours and met a legion of adoring fans, myself included. What unfolded over those hours really was a masterclass in connection and empathy. She gave each and every one of us her individual and undivided attention for the 5 minutes or so we talked. She took a real interest in people’s stories, and even gave the girl in front of me a hug (and her weary publicist a heart-attack!) She complimented my necklace and asked my friend and I the secret to our 31-year friendship. Suffice to say, I fangirled pretty hard but I think, think I managed to come across as vaguely coherent. Elizabeth, you are a complete gem of a human and we are all so lucky to have you in our lives. Thank you.

See you all next week for Part Two.