An abject failure

My latest balancing act

I’ve not posted here for a while because I’ve been in a headspace where self-reflection hasn’t been a priority; to be more accurate, I have been avoiding it. I use writing primarily to understand my frankly confounding self, and the strange world around me, and so this state has not been productive. I have to be soft and vulnerable in order to write well, and so in this hardened state I have not been producing anything of much value, and I feel like I am behind on everything.

Not writing here for a month feels like a failure. Not producing what I consider to be good work for what is now well over a month feels like a failure. So much of my life right now feels like an abject fucking failure because I put the most outrageous expectations on myself, always pushing that boulder. My self-worth is entirely wrapped up in my work.

It’s disappointing to accept that I’m just another cog in the big, capitalist machine. I always thought I would rail against such an existence, yet here I am, spending too much money on trainers made by impoverished children in the developing world, all in the hope that they will make me happy for five minutes. Capitalism is the reason we define ourselves on our output, on our ability to move through the world being happy and healthy and pretty and clever and consistent and ‘normal’. Image, self-improvement, wellness, there’s something we can work hard to buy that will solve all of our problems and ensure we are the dedicated little bees the hive requires.

It’s such bullshit though, isn’t it? The work is not the most important thing. Yet it always takes priority and has the greatest hold over our lives. I find it so hard to separate self-worth from productivity. But I do not attach any self-worth to pleasure, relaxation, hedonism, travel, the erotic. Pleasure is only a reward, a luxury allowed after enough hard work. Even then, pleasure comes with guilt.

Desperate to maintain a productive, functional, easy exterior as if it will somehow transform my interior has meant that I have been happily avoidant. As a result, quite suddenly the writing became hard, to the point of impossibility. Commerce, capitalism, these are the great enemies of creativity. I have been actively evading the page and the blinking, bastard curser, moving words around, making lists, cleaning the skirting boards, anything to give me purpose beyond doing the actual work that I love so much.

I hit a wall and I realised that it was time to turn things around and the only person that could do that was me. So here I am, after a lot of self-reflection and chats with myself in the mirror. Me writing here, sticking my neck out a bit, is me feeling better and coming back into the world, albeit wearing a metaphorical crash helmet.

Actual, not metaphorical, crash helmet

I essentially ran away from my responsibilities, from my writing, from the uncertainty of my life. I feel increasingly that I have three lives; one at home as a mother, partner, dedicated writer. One outside of that when I am without my child and with my old friends; I recognise her. She is the pre-motherhood, pre-Covid, pre-novelist Hattie.

And then there is this other, new me that is emerging as a result of being changed by becoming a parent and a writer, and the mysterious peace and equal chaos that has come with entering my forties. She feels like she is just beginning. She lives in her imagination and she feels so free, or thinks she does. She is screaming for freedom without knowing what freedom looks like. And it is intoxicating, and it is confusing, and it can be extremely challenging. I’m not entirely sure that I like her. Yet here she is.

I guess most people feel divided like this at some point. As a mothers, that can feel like being split between the home and the children, whatever other intimate relationships need maintaining, and then everything else; work, friendships, play, caring for aging parents, exercise, the commute, admin.

Separate from this, it has always felt to me like I have an old life, and a current life, and a life in the future. Like Dickens’ ghosts, they all want to tell me something and I am waiting for the night to come so that I can hear them, because I am desperate to hear them. (I hope they sing Marley and Marley when they do arrive.) The me that exists in these three dimensions is refracted again through the many me’s that exist simultaneously.

To speak directly to this dividing of self in relation to domestic life and or parenting, I wonder, do you feel like there is a psychic switch you have to hit when you turn the key in the front door, when you reach the school gate in the evening, when you hear those little feet padding across the hallway at 6 a.m? Like you can flick it again when you hear their Paw Patrol toothpaste-breath settle in the glow of their nightlight, when the questions about what everything eats and why the moon is the moon and what happened to the rest of the donut they half-ate six months ago stop, when they are finally asleep? When you then, twenty minutes later, miss them, and you want to go for the switch again?

It is not an on-off switch. All states are equally as powerful, and equally as different. There might be two, three, four or five settings for the different versions of yourself required.

I did not expect life to feel like this. I find a lot of parenting very hard in a way that I feel most other mums maybe don’t, like I am missing something instinctive. I can’t sit and play with Lego for hours on the floor. It takes everything I have to play cafe or doctor or house for more than ten minutes. I struggle badly with anxiety when my daughter is ill; she had her first tummy bug last week when I was solo parenting and I had the flu, and combined with a whole other bunch of stuff going on, honestly I couldn’t cope.

I felt like a terrible mother. I know that I am good at the emotional part of being a mum, and I love activities and days out and taking her to the theatre and reading with her and teaching her about nature and animals and feeding her and clothing her and getting her vaccinations and giving her bountiful affection and cuddles and unconditional love but still, I often feel very stuck, and like I am not a good parent. Like there is something missing. What is hardest is I don’t know how to be better because I can’t change so much of what is inside of me that needs to change for me to become the ideal of a mother I hold in my mind. I feel emotionally bound in ropes and chains about so much and I want, so much, to be different.

When I first expressed concerns about my limitations as a mum to my wonderful therapist some years ago, she introduced me to the ‘good enough’ parenting theory created by Donald Winnicott in the early 1970’s. This is the idea that perfection is not only unnecessary, but also actually quite harmful, and that a parent’s realistic, less-than-perfect care is truly beneficial for a child’s healthy development. I have found this helpful, as I have found it helpful to confide in fellow mothers when I feel that I am falling short, which is almost always. Seems a lot of us feel this way because I am yet to find a mum who says, ‘oh, not me. I’m a brilliant mum.’ A lot of us find much of parenting very different to what we were sold through TV and advertising and Instagram. Yet to me, everyone seems to be doing it better than I am.

‘Good enough’. I wasn’t brought up to believe that ‘good enough’ was anything more than failure. I was raised to aim for exceptional at all costs, to work harder than everyone else, to strive for perfection and excellence.

It came from a good place. But you know what? I am forty-one and I am fucking exhausted. I have been living my life like this for so long, and every time I fall short, I feel completely miserable because I feel like I am letting myself down, that I am useless, that I am a failure, and that there is nothing worse than failure. This level of self-criticism is boring and tiring and I don’t want to spend any more of my numbered days feeling this way.

Failure isn’t always bad. Failure is how we learn. It is what AI can’t do. It is what makes people better than AI. I love my friends for their failures because it has usually come from trying. When it hasn’t, I love them for being human.

When I worked in publishing I believed that I should always work harder and longer and quicker than everyone else. Some of this came from the massive chip I had on my shoulder over my lack of higher education, but this belief led me to think that this is what I should expect from other people. For a long time I was successful in my career, until I failed, spectacularly. Without this failure I would not have become a writer. As I have written before, I spent a long time after I left publishing essentially in hiding from the world, because without my job title and big career I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t feel like I had a place in the world. I didn’t feel that I was worth anything at all because I was no longer achieving anything special.

So then I did something ‘exceptional’ and I wrote a novel, and then a few months later I wrote another novel, and then I wrote a couple of feature films and a short story and many articles and essays and TV pilots and some other stuff.

(Please forgive me for calling my own achievement exceptional, but whilst writing novels feels both extremely difficult and extremely normal to me, it is viewed as such externally. And I am specifically talking about the battle between internal and external.)

Did writing make me feel exceptional? Nope! Did other people seeing my achievements as being exceptional feel good? Yep! I had an identity again. I was a high-achiever, clever, creative, an outlier.

People’s follow-up questions when you have written a novel go like this:

‘But you’re self-published? Oh, you are really published, like, properly?! Wow!’

‘But it’s not your main job? Oh, you’re a full-time writer?! Wow!’

It’s both annoying and validating. I hate the expectation that I’m a hobbiest, and I hate the shock that I’m vaguely successful. It’s almost like I can’t be fucking happy.

‘Good enough’. We just have to be ‘good enough.’

This is what I tell myself, it is my mantra, it is my secular prayer. It is what I am telling you. Sometimes I can even convince myself of it. Until the moment that I am less than ‘good enough’, the moment when I fail to take care of those I love the most, when my consideration of other people fails, when I let down a friend or embarrass myself. Then the emotional impact of my less-than-even-good-enough becomes failure and that floors me. The shame, the awful shame I feel, reduces me to a little more than a shell of the Hattie Williams you may or may not know, either in-person or online. I am unable to write, to mother, to love, to socialise.

I am trying to unlearn my attitudes. But the neurological pathways are Roman roads in my mind, carved out before even memory. No cognitive reasoning, no damage limitation attempts, no self-medicating or actual medicating can help. I must just continue to try to rewire, to rewrite the pathways. To be human is to want, and to want is to desire things we can’t have, which is to say we inevitably fail, and along the way make a hell of a lot of mistakes. Some damage can be repaired. Some can’t.

So how do I balance these Manichean ideals to become happier, and less consumed by self-criticism? That’s a big question! Be exceptional, but writing for one hour is ‘good enough’. Be exceptional, but three out of five days is ‘good enough’. Be exceptional as much as you can, and if it isn’t all the time, that’s ‘good enough’. Biggest of all, when you are only ‘good enough’, that’s OK. And when you are less than ‘good enough’, try not to be exceptional, but just… yeah. You got it. Try to be ‘good enough’.

These are some things that have helped me get back to a place where I am writing again.

The big one was admitting I was not in a good place. Telling a friend I couldn’t get out of bed, and them leaving me incessant ‘nee-naw’ voice notes until I got up and put Fight Test by The Flaming Lips on very, very loud. Pouring it all out via text to my best friends, writing freely and messily knowing they would love me regardless. Apologising when I have messed up, and knowing when to give space. Asking for practical help when I have needed it. Saying thank you and being vulnerable when I have accepted that help, when people have selflessly gone out of their way to give it to me. The 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique got me out of a horribly ill-timed episode of dissociation: bookmark it, friends. The reminder that the kind of work I do is not the kind of work that will happen every day because I am the mercy of my creative energy levels. Ugly crying on my friend’s shoulder in the pub. Allowing myself a day off, watching Sorry, Baby at 11am with a cup of tea instead of writing because my mind was too chaotic and anxious to work. Reading a fucking book. Listening to another fucking book. Watching Gabor Maté videos. Watching a load of old movies. Staying in bed. Eating vegetables and drinking water. Relaxing my jaw and dropping my shoulders. (Do this one now.)

And writing this. Coming back to the page and to you, who I hope understands, and I hope feels a little less alone for it. Everything I write, exceptional or ‘good enough’, must have a purpose, and that purpose is to connect us a little better. None of us are truly exceptional, or bad, or good, or ‘good enough’. We are all of these things. And we are unfinished.

BIG FEELING RECOMMENDS:

• My beautiful friend Salima Saxton’s Bad Patient Substack is one of the best you will find. Go subscribe, read, and thank me later

• Eva Victor’s movie Sorry, Baby is actually perfect

• I have been listening to Sophie K Rosa’s book Radical Intimacy and it is changing my entire worldview, and making me feel empowered to build a better life and a better world

• Bloopers give a nice quick hit of serotonin and I love them in a very basic way. This Instagram account is dedicated to them and it cheers me up a lot

• Violette France’s bisou balm in Sucette makes me feel about 25% better every time I layer it on because life is terrible and lipstick is truly magic.