My Failures: Part 1

The Times I Failed 

If it can't be helped, at least maybe it can help.

We all wake up sometimes haunted by shame and regret. Those emotions are either cripplingly useless or important ways of protecting us from making the same mistakes again. They can be a little of both those things, or a pendulum between the two states. 

I've made it a pet project recently to encourage people to fail. Particularly young women on the way up the ladder in the way that I am on my way up (presuming a linear narrative that may or may not be likely). 

My love of talking up failure is not because I want to weed out and destroy my competition, or at least I don't think it is. Sometimes our own motives are obscure to ourselves. But I THINK it's because i believe failure is incredibly important. 

The fear of failure has lead to more small and bordered lives than almost anything else in the first world. I'm not going to talk about externals here. It's easy to blame institutional and social pressures for your failure to excel. Those things exist. Those pressures are real. 

But more than anything else, failure and the fear of failure is a factor we can control. More than misogyny, or classism, or any of the manifold financial realities of the world we live in. Those things are worth fighting and examining, but your own agency is by definition, closer to home. 

It's important to notice when you've failed. Not to rewrite history, but to look at reality, and grow from it. 

I'm not sure whether I should start writing about my failures from the easiest up, or from the most shameful down. My urge is to start with quitting Law, which is the kind of failure that is easily glamourised and reframed as a success. 

Because I don't want to, I'll start with the worst thing. 

This is the one I wake up thinking about with dread and shame. The dead of night failure. The one I don't tell people. 

(ETA: I've been hovering over the post button for this for about an hour...)

When I was at uni, I wrote an article for the university newspaper. I thought it was very clever and funny. The kind of thing you write and still find funny when you read it back. I'd woken up with the idea fully formed in my head, and written it up with the kind of gleeful speed that makes you feel like a mythical artist.

I felt like Coleridge, struck by inspiration. I was in the midst of an insomniac period and would spend hours late at night gorging on articles and information, and then in sleep, some alchemy would happen and I'd wake up with a fertile brain. This seemed like a very good thing.

I sent the article in. It was published. Not long after, I got a call from the editor saying, I think this article might be plagiarised. 

My first reaction was scorn. (I remember writing this, by hand in my notebook. Where was I supposed to have plagiarised it from!?) my second was defensiveness, my third was rage, and then... I looked on the internet. 

I found it almost immediately. An article on a major web hub for comedy writing. The kind of thing I would have read late at night and promptly forgotten. Except part of my brain hadn't forgotten. I'd woken up with a fully formed harlequin suit, large patches of which were someone else's. 

So then I felt rage, self loathing. Shame. Fear. What are the implications of that kind of failure? Failure of the worst kind. Inexcusable. The kind of useless failure that can only harm you, and from which you feel you cannot grow. 

There was nothing I could do but plead stupidity. 

That's a nasty taste, when the only excuse for doing wrong is that you are a fool.

What was bad: 

I lost my sense of certainty in my own integrity. I had always assumed that theft wasn't something I was capable of doing. My dad was a crusader for copyright. I've never stolen anything, let alone someone else's creative ideas. To the point of being judgmental and arrogant, this was something outside my scope. I would never. 

But then, all of a sudden, I had. Like checking your pockets and finding someone else's wallet. I did something that I'd assumed was outside the scope of my personal ethics. Not only for no reason, but without intent. That didn't make it better. 

I had done something that was wrong, and worse, unjustifiable. My sense of shame arose from the unpleasant reality that my own pride in my clever funniness had blinded me to even the possibility that what I'd written wasn't mine. 

I looked back at everything else I'd ever written, in sudden doubt. I was lucky. This was a one off. I was glad of that, at least.

What was good: 

1) It happened early. I write for a living now, and am published in legitimate places. I'm glad this failure happened very early, in one of my first published pieces. I wish it had happened earlier. 

2) I am now very careful (to the point of paranoia) to begin from myself. I write from within myself, and the jokes I write now always emerge in a traceable linear way from deeply personal spaces, rather than from the mysterious ether.

That has the dual effect of making sure nobody else can say what I say, and making sure I'm not absorbing and regurgitating other people's work. Or if I am, it's VERY absorbed, and regurgitated as an unrecogniseable thin bile (no chunks) (This metaphor got away from me). 

3) I learned to think about influence. Inevitably we are a product of our influences, but being meticulously aware of the sources of your influence serves the dual function of making your creativity more complex, and more original. 

Does this mean that everything I say is wildly left field? No. As equally inevitable as your artistic influences, you'll be influenced by  ideas that are in the zeitgeist, responding to pressures that are shared with other humans (comedy needs to connect), so it's almost impossible to avoid Venn Diagram overlaps with other people's thought-lines, but bringing it home makes sure you have a point of distinguishable originality. 

The great academic, Bruce Gardiner at Sydney University, used to come out with pearls of wisdom during his lectures, and many of his asides and aphorisms have stuck with me. One particular lecture, he mentioned the idea that all words are a form of quotation; which is to say, something that is heard in one context, and then re-used for a different purpose in another context. So, quotation and influence are part of the way people communicate. 

There's a red line there, though, which is the line of intellectual honesty. If you make it a priority not to lie to other people, as I try to do, it's just as important (or more important) to ask regularly whether you're lying to yourself. This failure taught me that. And it's still deeply unpleasant to think about. It's also been a very useful failure. For me (and now, I hope, also for you.)

If it can't be helped, at least maybe it can help.

Chiz

Alice