Embracing failure

As a child and young person, I had the immense good fortune to be successful. No matter what I put my mind to, I seemed to be able to master it. I was unafraid of going for broke academically, musically and even physically.

I remember in standard/grade two at West School primary, Miss Douglas my teacher put a chart up on the wall. It was for times tables. Every set you memorised, from two through to twelve, you got a gold star for.

I remember seeing this thing, with the names of every kid in my class on it and just burning to be the first person to achieve all eleven gold stars. I worked hard and sure enough I achieved my goal, weeks before most of my classmates.

I would come into class and stare at my name on the chart, with all those gold stars next to it. I would consolidate my learning, re-rehearsing each set of times tables so my win wasn’t fake as I waited for the rest of the class to catch up.

I frequently experienced this kind of success; coming top in high school subjects, successfully auditioning for school productions and the Auckland Youth Choir. Achieving the top score in New Zealand’s Wairarapa region for piano exams.

The theme continued on into adulthood. I was selected from a pool of nine-hundred applicants to be one of eighteen New Zealanders to work at a prestigious sports plaza in Japan. I had to travel late to Japan, because the rowing team I was part of won the Auckland Regional Championships and medalled at Nationals.

Success, success, success…

I married early and walked into virtually any job I interviewed for in the USA, where I had moved with my new American husband.

I remember, all that success led to a kind of arrogance.

I tried hard not to be haughty, but I do remember encountering a divorced couple early in my married life and thinking quietly to myself, “Well, they didn’t try hard enough, did they?”

Then life kicked the snot out of me.

The young husband who had seemed such a catch when I was twenty-three became riddled with drug and mental health problems and my marriage imploded spectacularly.

I ended up returning to New Zealand, five months pregnant with little more than the clothes on my back and my tail between my legs.

I had been so exhausted by the turmoil of the breakup that all I could do was sit around and watch TV and cry for the first few months. It was the first great failure of my young life.

The leaving was hard. I had promised before God and all my friends and family to love, honour and stick with this guy, until death do us part. And yet, there I was having slunk back to New Zealand like a rat fleeing a sinking ship.

The feelings of failure hit me pretty hard, rippling through my life.

I remember going to sit my driving test in New Zealand at about eight months pregnant. I had driven for eight years on the other side of the road and needed to prove I was competent to make the old left-hand switcheroo.

I failed again. Something as simple as a driving test.

The old, shiny me would have sailed into that testing situation and produced the expected victory. But this new, overweight, confidence-shattered me didn’t seem to be up to the task. To any task really. I contemplated my growing baby belly with trepidation, wondering if I would make as rubbish a parent as I apparently was a driver.

Sitting in that failure was a difficult experience. I’m a learning and growth-oriented person, so the idea that I had fucked up royally was not a welcome one. Even when I came to grips with it, it needed to mean something.

This is what I eventually came up with:

Up until that point, I had blithely followed my nose through life. Ooooh, this opportunity to go to Japan has presented itself. Oooh this cute guy from overseas is really into me, I think I’ll take up his offer of marriage. Oooh we can go to a StarTrek Convention, and a Comic Convention? Yeah, let’s do those things. Etcetera, etcetera.

Now I had a chance to rebuild my life. Not randomly as I’d always done things before, but purposefully. It was time to make something of myself.

I went back to school and completed a First-Class Honours Degree in Biomedical Science. I got a scholarship to the University of Melbourne, raised my beautiful daughter and met my second husband. And for many years, things trucked along quite well.

There were successes and failures but I was more ready for them. And I managed to parlay my qualifications and experience into fifteen-year career at Monash University.

COVID, as it did with many people, shook things up for me. My university employer circumnavigated the first year of the global pandemic admirably due to good management. However, in the second year, with non-existent income from overseas students and mounting expenses, layoffs were mooted.

I was not initially in the firing line. But then I saw the fear on the faces of the colleagues who had been identified as “dispensible,” and the payout I would receive to leave. And when I wrestled with my long-buried ambition to become a writer, I put myself forward.

My offer was accepted and in the space of two days, I left my job, my home and my partner.

I moved to the hills, initially as a respite from domestic violence. But then my lovely housemate and I realised that the situation could very well work long term and she very kindly invited me to stay.

I picked up work with a friend and wrote and wrote and wrote.

It isn’t lost on me that this writing life I have chosen for myself involves a lot of failure. Rejection notices from publishers, unsuccessful pitches, stories entered in competitions that never actually get anywhere. There is the odd success every now and then but by and large, I have had to become comfortable with the extreme discomfort of failure. The “I’m sorry but your story isn’t quite what we’re looking for right now.”

It's a strange place but weirdly, I find it rather a wonderful one. To this point in my life, my successes have meant that experiencing the sting of defeat was a rare thing. But as I become more comfortable with it, a humility and a tenacity emerge within me that I find truly heartening.

Everyone can fail. It doesn’t mean you didn’t try hard enough. As with my marriages, sometimes you can give everything you have and it’s still not enough. And when you understand that from your own life, you are far more able to sit with others when it occurs in theirs.

I think that there was a part of me that thought that when I started to write, the literary industry would fall at my feet, stunned by my greatness, lol.

It hasn’t. In fact, it’s barely noticed me. And from that I’ve realised that a few half-baked ideas slung together however I please are not going to work.

I really have to hone my craft, to be worthy of reading. I’ve had to try and fail and go back to the drawing board again and again and again. I’ve had to study and rewrite and develop the resilience and self-belief to know that in the end, it’s all worthwhile.

I’ve had to examine why I write. Is it only to receive accolades?

What I’ve discovered is that no, it’s not for the glittering prizes. Stories flow out of me like lava, whether I submit them to publishers or not.

I am simply a writer. In writing I hope to disappear, leaving readers with themselves and their unique responses to the stories I tell.

I remember I wrote a story when I lived in the USA. It was about death and its mirror glass quality. I remember, one of the residents of the apartment community I was managing at the time read it. When she was done, she proceeded to cry and tell me about her husband’s death by suicide and how it had affected her.

The moment was one I truly treasure. It’s such a priviledge to be let into the inner lives of others and if my stories provide a conduit for that to happen then they are something truly worth writing.

So now I live in this world of regular failure. Not only enduring it and growing stronger from it, but embracing it. The humility and the insights gained are refreshing.