You’re better for your failures. As a writer, I cling on to that. I lie in bed night after night, those words ringing in my ears. You’re better for your failures, I tell myself. It doesn’t matter that nobody will hire you, or even do you the decency of answering your emails. Think of Joyce! I tell myself. Nobody would publish Ulysses for years. Perhaps employers can see that I don’t belong, that I’m destined for greater things. I’m just finding my place still, I tell myself. Someone is saving me for something else, something better, I tell myself. All I have to do is accept having little to no money in the present and one day I will be reaping the rewards, I tell myself.
It's these things we tell ourselves that make it bearable. It’s the narrative we construct around our lives that gives us meaning. You’re better for your failures, they tell us. Trying to ascribe some greater purpose to your foundering – it’s all bollocks, of course. They know that you wouldn’t get out of bed if you thought the opposite. That you were your failures. That your failures were, and remain to this day, completely arbitrary. That life is not a book, and you are not the hero of it. That you just keep living, that they do not plateau out. You may experience as much adversity in your sixties as you do in your twenties, that’s what no one will admit. That there is no narrative arc and certainly no secret twist.
You just haven’t found your place yet, my darling. That’s what my mother told me when I was fifteen and screaming from the rooftops about how the other girls used to tease me at school. One day, your failure to conform will be your greatest strength, she told me. All those tear-stained diary entries will not have been for nought. That narrative I constructed in my head – that one day I would be a rockstar or a great actress or like Arthur Rimbaud. I fell asleep to these stories every night. In a way, they were my first – and only, as of now – masterpiece. I believed in them hook line and sinker. All those tear-stained diary entries would be but a footnote in the autobiography of my great life.
I don’t tell myself these stories now. That all stopped when I graduated. That all stopped when I had the terrible revelation that my future was no longer in front of me. It was here. I was living it. I grew up – shudder. No more, ‘what do you want to do when you grow up?’. What are you doing now, they start asking you. You realise you’re doing very little. Nothing like fifteen year old you thought you’d be doing, anyway. I haven’t even headlined the Palladium yet. Every day, the future gets further and further behind. It's a horrible moment, when you realise that the future is now, that you’re already living it. Time is a funny thing; these narratives we tell ourselves.
Time as it happens in your head always seems to assume that there’s something just beyond. Just over there. Your narrative is still in its infancy. Or at least, somewhere in the middle. That you’re just waiting for something. It’s maddening, of course. The bait we dangle in front of ourselves. But it’s also the only thing that keeps us going. I would not recommend going without it. It’s a useful thing, this bait. We’d be nowhere otherwise – we’d probably be on the kitchen floor chain smoking ourselves to death. Or is that just me? I suppose that’s conditioning. Since the dawn of the agricultural revolution, we’ve been trained to think about what’s just round the corner. The next harvest. The next quarter. The next job. The next boyfriend. The next day. Before you know it, you’re wishing your life away.
We cannot comprehend fifty years from now. We cannot fathom the end of it all. We cannot grasp what our lives might look like when we’re seventy-four. Equally, we cannot make sense of the fact that we might not be here. I mean, we can. On an intellectual level, many of us understand that one day we will die. But on a visceral level, I’m not so sure. When it happens, we may still be locked in the cavernous crater of our failures, just waiting for tomorrow. When things might perk up. I’m talking from my twenties. I wonder what I’ll think in fifty years. Will I think, in fifty years. No one thinks it will happen to them, until it does. Growing up, into failure. Not the other way around.
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