Failing Well

By Charley Hines

Illustration by Lizzie Quirke

It’s strange to me, now, how much I value my failures. They are never enjoyable, of course, and the sting left behind from years of hatred towards them still pricks at the inside of my head. But now, on my journey through life with a mental illness, I find myself at a wide open plain. Things are as they are — I am learning not just to celebrate my successes, but to examine, talk about, and learn from my mistakes. Even — perhaps especially — when I find myself needing to apologise.

Being a “gifted and talented” child was like climbing a staircase up and up, away from the ground. But every time I passed a step, another would appear somewhere at the top. The landing would be forever out of reach. The step I had just taken would vanish behind me, leaving me with no way down unless I fell. Falling was the ultimate failure, according to everyone else, and the inevitable fall came with an extended period of lying at the bottom of this pit of despair, mortified with myself.

That was part of the stigma, for me — the burden of believing that depression meant I had failed, my sadness meant I was ungrateful, and my pain meant I was self-centred. What worries me most is that, in certain circles, I have encountered the same attitudes persisting. My world has expanded immeasurably since I stopped trying to shame those feelings away, but instead to observe them, and read them. Anger, sadness, and frustration have all played an enormous part in helping me learn how to love myself better.
People tell me often how they admire my success, and that they wish they could be more like me, and it jars because I fail every single day. Sometimes by accident, often through lack of organisation, occasionally exhaustion or frustration compels me to let a victory slip through my fingers. I feel immensely guilty in those moments, as if I have some duty to live up to some projected expectation of something that isn’t actually realistic.

Failure is not only something we observe ourselves, it is something handed out to us by others. Just as on the one hand I’m often seen through rose-tinted lenses, there are also people telling me the ways in which they think I have failed. Still single; still flitting in and out of home; work; money; my body… endless ways in which I do not measure up to other people’s standards. The problem is, everyone’s standards are wildly different, and trying to please everyone is an impossible task.

But behind every failure is a story, and stories make up a life lived. I am fascinated by the failings of others — hearing stories that skipped from the seed of an idea to the shiny, happy end result is tremendously boring and not at all inspiring. I want to hear about struggle, doubt, changing path, trying again, choosing the way, because that is what’s real.

That’s what we all do on a day-to-day basis, not only as we fail, but as the world around us fails — our train is late; the bus breaks down; we get cancelled on. We amend, we reroute, we sort things out. We learn there is another way, that someone unexpected will pull through, that something needed to give in order for a difficult conversation to happen.

As I move through my days, I try to embrace failure in all its forms, whether it is a failing on my part or on the part of someone else. I get to practise forgiveness, patience, tact, and the art of apology. It is not always neat and tidy. Some days, I wish desperately that I really could get everything right all of the time. But then I would miss out on so much – on the euphoria of finding a better way to do something, the warmth of deepening a relationship, the relief that comes with having the time and space to explain yourself clearly and fully, and to offer that same space to others. Failure has so, so much to offer, if only we can walk beside it.