Brilliant failures, a term coined by an organization that studies them, are those where people with all the right intention and commitment actually fail in their efforts, but then go on to recover and achieve brilliantly as a result of what they learned from their failure.
After failing to establish my career as a lawyer, largely because we kept moving countries due to my husband’s career, I decided to retrain as a journalist. Journalism, it seemed, could cross political and temporal boundaries.
Once qualified, I managed to procure various freelance writing jobs in the three cities (Wellington, New Zealand; Sydney, Australia and finally Jakarta, Indonesia) we lived in over the next seven years, until it all came to a sudden halt in 1998.
I was in the middle of researching a story on child labor for the English language daily The Jakarta Post. I had devoted about 20 hours to interviewing ‘talent’ for the article when students were shot on the university campus by police, sparking frightening riots in the streets and culminating in the demise of President Suharto.
My children and I were evacuated to Australia for 6 weeks and the story I had worked so hard at, was reassigned. It was so frustrating and demoralizing. It seemed that every time I found good and rewarding work for myself, something outside my control occurred to force me to abandon my efforts.
The stinging tears of self-pity were still fresh on my cheeks when an idea formed in my mind. It was the idea to forget about writing, for the moment, and to just read. It came to me to read everything I found interesting - from spirituality, to feminist tracts, literature, biographies, even cutting edge business books.
When I returned to Melbourne 18 months after the evacuation I enrolled in, and completed graduate and postgraduate degrees in Literary Studies, which gave me a good grounding in literary theory, exposing me to a broad range of writers and theorists, whilst also completing a study major and a thesis in creative writing.
My cherished, but largely unarticulated dream was to write a book. At first I thought I wanted to write something literary. My creative writing thesis comprised 600 lines of poetry - all one poem - which took me a year to write.
I was extremely hopeful of achieving a first class honors for the thesis, all the signs from my supervisor were good. The other academic who marked the thesis clearly did not agree with her, and I missed out on first class honors by two marks. I was devastated. Yet again I cried tears of disappointment and frustration.
Then Ian, the love of my life for 20 years, died suddenly. Everything I experienced, and learned, in coping with the grief and loss of that trauma played its part in preparing me for the book I began writing two and a half years later (published 18 months after that).
Everything that happened, everything I learned about life, death and love, all of it was a crucial piece in the puzzle of my life. It was all necessary to bring to fruition all that had been percolating in my mind for thirty years. It was the final piece I needed to be able to address others’ suffering and write about it in a book written purely for the purpose of helping others cope with the pain of their own losses.
As Matt, my good friend and personal trainer for the last six years, said, I had to live the blues to be able to sing the blues. My failures and disappointments combined to become the brilliant failure that opened up a whole new life I never really thought was possible for me. It was just waiting for the right moment.
