The most successful thing I have ever written was an article about failure. I suppose I was asking for that. The piece has just ticked over its ten thousandth view, and it brought a big bump to the audience of this newsletter upon its publication. More importantly, people from both my life and strangers reached out to tell me the piece had resonated with their experience. They felt the cultural conversation about failure as a stepping stone to success was incongruent with their experience.
At the time, I joked that I could become the failure guy, that being a failure could be my thing, although obviously that’s a position which is difficult to sustain over the long term, certainly without undermining one’s own credentials in the matter. Oh, sure, friends assured me that I’d always be ‘the failure guy’ to them, but the truth is that not a role – an expert on disappointment – you can sustain unless you really feel it. I felt a proper failure, not a secretly-content-with-myself one.
The voice in my head which tells me that I am a failure has gone much quieter of late. I just don’t feel that anymore – I don’t think ‘failure’ is an accurate assessment of my life. There are many reasons for this shift but the fundamental one seems to be that I got a job.
The most significant event of my adult life so far occurred in May 2003. I had just turned 20. At the Oxford Playhouse, in front of an audience of my student peers, the Oxford Revue’s annual show, which I wrote and directed, was received as a spectacular failure. I’ve written about it often before, in the initial piece on failure which did so well, in the follow-up essay reflecting on it, and I dramatized the specific events which led to this success more precisely in my 2022 novel ‘Midlands’. In all those events, I was looking to exorcise the aspects of the event which haunted me. Of course, my strategic error was to think that could be done by attaining a countervailing success further down the line.
Now I’m sure it sounds absurd – saying that a piece of obscure student drama, which not even the people who were in it probably remember, was such a foundational event in my life. But that is what happened; for years, I felt absolutely haunted by that evening and, while absolutely able to get on with other things, still felt wounded inside. I had some sort of stabilizers built into the soul, a sense that I couldn’t risk that much or experiment too wildly, precisely because I was so keen to cultivate a redeeming success. No matter what I lived or experienced I always felt that an air of public humiliation hovered around me.
I certainly don’t mean to say that the years afterwards were without successes. I’ve long lived my life in the spirit of some slightly deranged Victorian colonel diving into the Darién Gap, ploughing on into the foliage with no clear plan other than ‘Through!’ It’s brought me concrete attainments; I could make a list of my achievements in adult life and I’m sure you’d all be mildly impressed. But subsequent achievements aren’t the answer to removing a sense of failure; it has to occur from within. That has now happened. The pain within me is gone.
It genuinely seems astonishing to me that it could take twenty years to heal from something like this though. Twenty years! That could end up being at least one sixteenth of my life. I never, to be clear, wanted to feel like a failure, I just kept on doing so. Perhaps it was just a matter of letting enough time pass to make the events of Oxford appear distinctively like they occurred in another era; once they start making nostalgic pictures about the time of your university days, you know it’s been some sort of time.
Love helped. It’s a cliché to say that we marry to have a witness to our lives, but less so to go into the specifics of what the process of being witnessed entails. My wife has, just through being in my life, seen just how much I’ve struggled – the BBC sitcom which failed at the last minute, the seven full-length scripts which I failed to get produced and, most heartbreakingly for her, the multiple decent jobs I got close to getting and didn’t get. She has witnessed all that and I have performed bouncing back for the sake of her spirits as well as mine. The simple continuity of her witnessing has had a healing effect too; in my worst moments these past seven years, I have never been truly alone.
I moved country, too, which for all its discombobulation – the presence of chicory, the absence of Marmite – has led to me having a new set of challenges and these quite tangible in nature. The UK hasn’t been kind to me; I’m not sure it’s kind to anybody but the most blandly ambitious these days. The endless rejection of my creative work there has driven me half-mad.
As is natural, I do think a lot of the people who my work has been passed over in favour of, across countless writing and comedy competitions, are doing much less durable work than me. But the difference is I no longer feel the pain of that, and just get on with making my writing as good as possible. That, to me, is the responsibility of an artist; to make their art good. Success follows or it doesn’t, but now this is something that I, rather than saying to sound good at parties, actually know in my soul.
It’s also just about getting older, which is not at all how I expected it to be. That driving colonel in the jungle approach to life, so determined not take any ‘No’ for an answer, seems to me very much an attitude of youth. Now I rather suspect that I will achieve my longest-held dreams and also that they will solve no fundamental aspects of my human experience, aside perhaps from the need for money.
Of course, I will keep writing, and I have to believe my best or at least most lucrative work lies ahead of me. Yet even doing that feels almost like dreaming, as I’ve been at it long enough to have sufficient craft that writing feels like just another thing which happens in my life. Who writes these newsletters, really? There’s just a sense of growing abstraction to everything in midlife as sense fades and bodies lose their vim; what really interests me now, whatever paraphernalia of achievement attach to my name, is feeling, sharing and giving love. My youthful commitment has provided a basis of work and determination which I can build on but I think part of the approach now to my doing my best work is not to try and force it; to show less will, more acquiescence to the flow of life.
It’s also about decline, about the fact that, as I often say to myself in my early 40s, you are now a declining concept not an ascending one. This is not to say that midlife isn’t your peak; it absolutely is, I was never better than now, I manage an immensely complex web of personal interactions with subtlety and aplomb, I suck the very sap out of the days but – the point of being at a peak is that you can also now see the view below. I can see the place down there, and the gentle sloping path down to it, and sooner or later I will begin my descent as younger people make their way in more and more numbers to where I stand now.
So success becomes viewed through a slightly faded lens. You’re aware of it, you experience it as nice, but you’re also aware it won’t solve the fundamental problems of being a human on this lonely spinning rock, and weirdly this attitude seems to generate greater personal success. It’s not so much as that you age out of the need for a redemption arc, it’s just that there seems something naïve about any neat narrative of closure. Success has a gossamer, evaporative quality, unlike failure, which is hard and materialist and a relentless reassertion of the reality of your circumstances.
I don’t live there any longer; too many things have gone right. But perhaps more importantly there simply isn’t enough time left to me any more to realistically play through any failure which isn’t strictly necessary, or ruminate endlessly on past shortcomings. I have 30-40 years of life to play with if I’m lucky. Of course my sense of failure is dissipating. I’m running out of time.