Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

The Uses of Failure

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I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. 
-Thomas Edison
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Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
Lauren Winner kindly sent me her book, Still about her divorce and mid-faith crisis.
I was struck by these sentences: I simply could not stay married. I came to believe that I could not do this thing I had said I would do; I could not do it. I was unable to do it. It is a mark of my charmed life that is was the first time I had ever tried to do something, and simply failed. And it was a failure: a spectacular, grave, costly failure.
I wondered: Is that indeed a charmed life? Not knowing failure? Can you imagine the stress levels if you’ve never failed, cannot fail? If failing is not an option?
·      * *  
The first failures of a normally high-achieving person are dreadful and humiliating.
Dying 
Is an art, like everything else. 
I do it exceptionally well. 

I do it so it feels like hell. 
I do it so it feels real, Sylvia Plath writes. 
Yeah, failing feels like hell; well, your first big failure, and your second… After your third, you shrug. Failure is now an option. Not so bad, not so unthinkable.  You are released into creativity.

* * *
Here are my three biggest failures to date: I went off to be a nun with Mother Teresa, when I was 17, left for the rest of my life I thought. I went up to boarding school to say goodbye to the nuns, went and said goodbye to my grandmothers and aunts.
And then, 14 months later, it was all unendurable. Oh, but the praise I had received. I had a stash of letters praising me. I belonged to a prominent Catholic family, and everyone had heard of it; everyone was predicting I would be the next Mother Teresa. And I was just 18 now. And leaving. Oh dear!!
At night, I stood before a statue of Mary (haven’t prayed to Mary since then…) and touched her feet in a sentimental gesture the other nuns did as they passed, and said, “Well, if I have to leave, give me TB, so I will have an excuse.”
No, no TB. I had to face failure and leave. And then, after a month at home, I coughed  blood, I had a shadow on the lungs. The TB I had foolishly prayed for appeared, but too late to be a convenient excuse… Lesson: do not pray foolish prayers!!
Other failures: I had an undergraduate degree from Oxford, and was accepted to a Ph.D on the mythopoeic imagination of Milton. (I don’t have the faintest idea now about what I might have written, but apparently I then had some ideas on the subject. Well, John Carey interviewed me, and I convinced him.)
All I had to do was get a First.  I thought I might; my tutor thought I might when she wrote my Ph.D reference. But I did not. Oh the shame! I was shattered! So no Oxford Ph.D for me. In fact, I moved left, from English to Creative Writing. Too crushed to apply to competitive US universities, I applied to schools with lots of funding, and went to the University which offered me the most money, the Ohio State University. Probably the right choice: I learned a lot about the craft and techniques of writing which I might not have in a snobbier school.
The third failure, the one which broke my pride was when my first book manuscript, which I was so sure would be published, which I struggled to write when Zoe was a baby, which I had told everyone about, was turned down by the publisher and agent. I was crushed!
 * * *
But I learned my lesson. I no longer defined myself by what I did. When people asked, I used to say I was a writer, I’d done xyz, I’d won xyz. Once I moved back to England from America, I waffle, “a bit of blogging, a bit of writing, a bit of business” and turn the subject to the other person. It’s setting up high expectations for yourself, or allowing others to hold them for you that makes failure so crushing. Being someone who does “a bit of this, and a bit of that,” well, that gives you the freedom to experiment and fail!
                                                           * * *
Both Roy and I were high-achievers, and, by temperament, very hard on ourselves and other people.  Both of us found it very hard to accept failure, stupidity or mistakes, our own, or each other’s.
When I started a publishing business–in which I didn’t quite know what I was doing, was partly learning from books, kind friends, and the internet, and partly inventing it as I went along–I made lots of mistakes. Some of them, of course, expensive ones!!
Roy would get cross. “Price to sell,” he’d say. “Oh, you under-priced!” he’d say. Oh the second-guessing.
In the summer of 2007, just when our publishing business was getting off the ground, I read Carol Wimber’s book “The Way it Was” about John Wimber, and how they established The Vineyard Movement at high speed. “Who were we to think that we were so smart that we should never make mistakes?” she wrote. They tried something; if it took, great. If there was a firestorm, they dropped it. And the willingness to experiment and fail meant they established the Vineyard at lightning speed.

That idea set me free. Who am I that I shouldn’t make mistakes? All human beings are limited. All human being make mistakes! Who am I that I should never get things wrong?

And that helped me enormously in business. Try something, risk it, we might get it wrong, make a mistake, lose money. Or we might not. Conversely, we might make a lucky bet, make a lot of money. “Who were we to think that we were so smart that we should never make mistakes?”
The willingness to fail releases creativity. And the failure and successes of the business helped me in blogging. I post almost every day, which means inevitably that some posts will be slight, some will bore some people, some will fail.
There is nothing like blogging daily to get you used to keeping the car moving, keeping writing, even if most posts sadly are less than your best because of the limitations of time and energy. There is nothing wrong with sometimes failing in a blog post. You still learn things you can use in a successful post. You still develop writing skills. You learn what you can do well–and what you cannot bring off!! And you conquer the fear of failing which might prevent you writing or sharing anything in the first place!!
* * *
I had lunch and went walking on Saturday with an old friend of mine from my undergraduate days in Oxford who has rarely failed. Her parents were a long serving Tory MP and a director of a famous, fabled investment bank. She went to England’s most exclusive girls’ boarding school, then on to Oxford, where she got a First, and  eventually a Ph.D. Got a job in Management in a leading FTSE company, and earned more than her husband, a consultant in a top London teaching hospital. Brilliant, pretty, extremely well-dressed, nice, with integrity. A straight arrow.
So she adopts her only child 7 years ago, from a nation known for their intelligence. And recently got him into a leading private school in London. She said that nothing, no university she had applied to, no exam she had taken, no job she had applied for, had every stressed her as much as getting this boy to a leading private school.
I have observed her consumed by this all year, and wondered why. I suddenly realized. She would have felt she had failed as a mother if her adopted son did not get into this posh school near their house. And she had rarely ever failed. She had always systematically set herself to succeed. Failure was not an option.
* * *
I am at the other end of the school saga, and last week attended an applying to university evening at my daughter’s school in Oxford. Haggard strained faces! Those who had themselves been to Oxbridge, and were successful were stressed about whether their daughters would follow their route. Those who had been to a mediocre university, but had nevertheless been successful wanted their daughters to have a better chance in life. And there were the haunted faces of those who had neither been successful in higher education or in life, but so wanted more for their daughters.
It’s a highly selective, highly competitive school. Like Lake Wobegon, everyone acts as their child is brilliance itself. The school’s self-esteem policy prohibits disclosure of marks. And then suddenly, in this pack of geniuses (if you believe their parents) some go to Oxbridge, and some go to Loughborough. No wonder, there were such strained faces.
I would have got as stressed as my old college friend if I had not failed before. If I had not learned that it’s okay to fail; it’s not so bad, you shrug your shoulders and get on with life. So truthfully, I am not stressed about university admissions. If she does not get into her first choice of university, I will feel as I have failed as an involved parent—and that will be true, because we have been distracted parents. We’ve left their education to the girls and the school. But knowing I’ve failed, well, it’s happened before. It’s part of being human. It no longer has the terrible shame it used to have for me.
Okay, I am trying to talk myself into sense. To tell the truth, they had representatives from Oxford, Cambridge etc. talk about interviews and personal statements and university visits and it seemed to us, Roy, me and our daughter a bit much to handle in the pressured final year at school. So she’s decided to do a gap year, and do her university application in the autumn, and then an amazing voluntary internship somewhere—24/7 prayer perhaps, Soul Survivor, Lee Abbey, the possibilities are endless.
So will I get stressed about university admissions when it finally comes time? Well, I don’t intend to stress. And if I do, I can always read this!
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Comments

  2. So true, and thanks for sharing. I think sometimes God has used my failures more than my successes. Is it that somehow when I've failed there's less of me in the way and more room for Him?

  3. Oh man, you've hit the nail on the head. I'm actually planning on posting on failure tomorrow on my blog and may just direct people to you 🙂 Thanks for your insight!