Finding the fun in Failure.

A work in progress.

I was asked last week, for my Askholes Q and A how I approach failure. I am reticent to admit, I am something of a failure pervert. I love the stuff. Can’t get enough of it. Partially because it’s where the real nuts and bolts of your character are fastened, but also because I literally can’t stop failing.

You may look at my instagram and think, this girl knows nothing of the stuff. In spite of my questionable fringe and foul mouth, I’ve covered Vogue multiple times, I was named one of Time Magazine’s 25 most influential people. Alongside Donald Trump! (Fun!) I have been in some critically acclaimed shows and been part of some films that did pretty well. I have objectively, quite nice boobs and I’m financially stable, with two great dogs who don’t bite people (even when I sort of wish they would), and I am in a lovely decade long relationship. (Even I am finding this paragraph insufferable.)

I in fact, fuck things up all the time. I don’t mean this in some trivial… “I eat like a pig!” Or “sometimes I fart” way. I mean I really fuck things up. I say the (very) wrong thing, at the (very) wrong time, I make the wrong calls, I back the wrong people, I don’t work hard enough, I don’t wait til I’m ready, I embarrass myself, I embarrass everyone else. I’ve lost all my money twice. I’m not in touch with 99 percent of my family. I’m currently a year and a half late on my book… And one time I had to shit on the street in broad daylight, as a grown adult, in front of people, and only didn’t go viral because I looked so rough that day, that one person said to their small child, “Honey, stop pointing at that homeless man!” as they crossed the street to avoid me. I didn’t even manage to successfully kill myself both of the times I really, really tried. I can’t get past three pumps of reverse cow girl. I ate so much sugar last year that I went pretty substantially blind for a few months. I’ve lost an astonishing amount of my teeth for my age. My house has been broken into three times, and my chosen belongings are so ugly and worthless, that nobody ever takes anything.

I was once named the first contestant in the history of the Great British Bake Off to make a desert that was so badly made, it was deemed UNSAFE for the judges to eat. Imagine being the person to nearly Kill Mary Berry! (I at one point in the episode also accidentally set fire to everything I was making, and got so stressed, I tried to escape the baking tent out of the window and had to be stopped by security.)

(Mine is obviously the tiny gross, and it turns out even at that size, somehow still raw, one)

I have made flop television, I have written misogynist, slut shaming blogs in the past that I am so deeply ashamed of and embarrassed by, I have offended literally millions of people at a time, to the point where I sometimes unite the left and right in their mutual rage with me. (So technically quite successful in being a unifying and bonding force in an otherwise divided world!)

I’m a mess.

And yet here I am, somehow, still bursting at the seams with self esteem.

THE AUDACITY.

And I’m going to tell you how/why.