How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong. Elizabeth Day
Jessica Alba and Christina Aguilera all came from military families.
There’s a sense, too, in which not being able to fit in makes you cultivate independence and resilience. If you move around a lot, you become used to making the most of your own company. If you’re like me, you lose yourself in stories and imagination and create rich internal worlds to counterbalance the external complexities.
When I interviewed Clint Eastwood in 2008, he recalled his own itinerant childhood as his father, a steel worker, travelled up the West Coast of America looking for work in the 1930s.
‘It was kind of lonely in some ways because you never went to the same school for six or seven months, you were always moving on somewhere,’ Eastwood said.
The rap star Wiz Khalifa, too, was a military brat. I spoke to him about it for Elle magazine in 2015. We met in a classic Los Angeles hip-hop pad – all white walls and clean angles and heavy clouds of weed obscuring the view of the Hollywood Hills beyond and he told me he moved bases every couple of years – to Germany, the UK and Japan.
Always being the new, ‘nerdy’ kid at school made him ‘nervous’ so music was his refuge: ‘Seeing everybody else being confident and knowing everybody, and me just kind of coming from the outside, it wasn’t comfortable at all,’ he said. ‘But doing my music, it was just my way of being the best at what I was interested in.’
He later turned his music into a chart-topping career and a net worth of $45 million.
But it wasn’t just the army kids who struggled to fit in. The novelist Sebastian Faulks told me he ‘loathed’ the boarding school he was sent to at the age of eight. Later, he went to Wellington College, which he ‘disliked intensely’.
‘It was traumatic, undoubtedly because the world you found yourself in, it just bore no relation to any world I’d ever known,’ he said. ‘Iron bedsteads, weird clothes, weird food, Latin, Greek, hymns and … there was no experience for the first sort of month that I’d ever had before. But eventually you sort of got used to it. And I remember one term I didn’t go home at all because there was some sort of mumps outbreak and in some ways it was easier not to go home at all actually. And I learned to fit in and adapt.’
The actress Christina Hendricks, who starred as Joan in the hit series Mad Men, was bullied at school. When I interviewed her for the Observer in 2014, she told me her parents had moved from Idaho to Virginia because of her father’s job when she was thirteen. She hated her new high school and felt ‘uprooted’ and resentful.
She wore Birkenstocks and ‘hippy dresses’. She was surprised when she saw the other girls her age at her new school ‘carrying purses [handbags]. I was like, “Ooh, purses!” To me, only moms had purses. They were much more sophisticated and they were having sex and wearing make-up – all these things that had not happened for me.’
From the start, Hendricks was singled out. ‘We had a locker bay, and every time I went down there to get books out of my locker people would sit on top and spit at me. So I had to have my locker moved because I couldn’t go in there … I felt scared in high school. It was like Lord of the Flies. There was always some kid getting pummelled and people cheering.’
Hendricks found her tribe in the drama department. Acting provided an outlet for a feeling of impotent rage. She became a goth, dyeing her hair black and purple, shaving it at the back and wearing leather jackets and knee-high Doc Marten boots. She said her clothes, and her capacity for reinvention, provided a type of armour against what she was experiencing.
‘My parents would say, “You’re just alienating everyone. You’ll never make any friends looking like that.” And I would say, “I don’t want those people to be my friends. I’m never going to be friends with the people who beat up a kid while everyone is cheering them on. I hate them.”’
Of course, we know now how the story turned out: Hendricks’ passion for drama turned into a successful career, winning her critical plaudits, Emmy nominations and the slavering admiration of a legion of borderline-obsessive fans.
That, it seems, is what connects all these stories: the lesson that, in order to survive, one needs either to adapt to a potentially hostile environment or to redirect one’s pain into a more positive – and often creative – outlet. It strikes me that school is not simply a place where academic lessons are taught but also a place where we educate ourselves on who we are; where we can try out different identities and see what fits before the constraints and responsibilities of adulthood are upon us.
I was always so frustrated as a teenager when condescending grown-ups would tell me that schooldays were the best days of my life and that I should ‘make the most of them while you can’. At the time, I wondered whether it was one of those things I might grow into believing, in the same way as I grew into French cinema and liking pesto, but I never have. Schooldays were categorically not the best days of my life and, in fact, I still have nightmares about them.
On the podcast, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, creator of the Bafta-winning Fleabag, spoke about the ‘duality’ she felt at school. At home she had been raised to be strong-minded and to test unnecessary boundaries and yet she was entering a place where rules had to be obeyed.
‘I remember my mum saying to me when I first went to secondary school, “Just be an angel for the first three terms, if you are an angel for the first three terms, you’ll get away with anything you want for the rest of your school career,”’ Waller-Bridge said. ‘And I really took that to heart and I made sure that I worked hard, I got the little badges or whatever you got, but the whole time [I was] just basically saying to my mates, “If I nail this then I can take anyone down later.”
‘And it was so true because then I just had the reputation of being a hardworking student, and I was a massive practical joker and the cheekiness, that also my mother had bred in me, was brilliantly offset by the lesson to appear to be a good girl and you’ll get away with being a bad girl.’
Of course, it was this duality that Waller-Bridge later deployed to great effect in Fleabag where the protagonist is, to all intents and purposes, a seemingly nice, well-brought-up middle-class girl who is actually grappling with darker issues of grief and abandonment and who uses sex as distraction from having to deal with her own inadequacies. Within that premise lies a further duality because although Fleabag ultimately addresses serious themes, it is also unabashedly funny.
Failure to fit in at an early age teaches us to develop a resilience that can ultimately help us flourish. The political campaigner Gina Miller found this to be the case when she was sent from her home in Guyana to boarding school in Eastbourne at the age of eleven. She was targeted by bullies for looking different and for the way she spoke. Before leaving home, Miller had taken a bottle of her mother’s L’Air du Temps perfume with her to remind her of all the things she loved. Every night before going to sleep in her dormitory bed, Miller would dab a bit of the scent on her pillow before another girl spotted what she was doing and tipped the perfume down the toilet. When she discovered what had happened, Miller shed a few private tears before assessing her options. She could tell on the bully, which would alienate her from the other girls. She could suffer in silence, which might make her seem like a pushover. Or she could try and win the bully over.
Miller went for the last option, giving the girl in question a bracelet as a peace offering.
‘As soon as I reached out to the girl who was bullying me, her defences crumbled,’ Miller recalled. ‘I didn’t counter anger with anger. Nor did I show I was upset. Instead I tried to disarm her with kindness so that we could engage with each other. Once a bully sees you as human, that’s half the battle.’
She added: ‘All of this taught me an important lesson. It was that most bullies act from a place of weakness. They feel threatened and backed into a corner by something – or someone – they don’t understand. Bullying is the way they lash out, but underneath all that bravado, there’s often a fragile individual riven with insecurities and weakness who doesn’t know how to express him or herself when confronted by the unknown.’
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