Monthly Archives: March 2021

If you can live with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same:
…
Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it

Rudyard Kipling, If

Sitting on my dad’s chair in his study in my childhood home, I would read the framed copy of this poem that hangs on the wall at least once a month. I’ve lived by Kipling’s words for as long as I can remember.

When things go well, I celebrate. When things so badly, I do my best to do exactly the same things. I stop work early, I treat myself to time playing games or watching a movie, I enjoy a drink of my favourite whisky.

Today, on hearing that I hadn’t been shortlisted for a job that I had publicly declared an interest in, I realised that I needed to go further.

Because I’d tweeted about it and written a Linkedin article about it, and because if I’d been successful I would have Tweeted about it and posted about it on Linkedin, I owed it to myself to do the same now I’ve been unsuccessful.

I can’t say to myself that I treat triumph and disaster just the same if I stop myself short because this bit of it is embarrassing. Of course it’s embarrassing. Of course I don’t want to share it. But holding ourselves to our values is not about what we want, it’s about what we do.

So I failed. And I failed publicly. And it’s embarrassing. But I have lived up to the standards I set for myself. I can hold my head high because I honoured myself. That is more important to me than any victory I might win or any defeat I might suffer.

When we refuse to let failure beat us down, we discover it can lift us up.

I recently wrote a thread on Twitter about smiling through it. I wanted to share words of encouragement to people, based on how much I remember the concept of this blog helping me when I needed it most.

Remember: every day there is brightness. One tiny thing that makes you smile, one infinitesimally small thing that’s funny or cute or pleasurable in some way. Hold on to that one thing. When you go to bed at night, remember that thing. Write it down if you want to. That one symbol of brightness can sustain you longer than you can possibly imagine.

From @olilewington on Twitter

And I stand by that. What happened in the rest of the day was the problem.

I’m currently struggling with chronic pain, often severe, in my lower back and tailbone. Because of the dangers of my going into a clinical setting while immunosuppressed in the current climate, I’m having to talk to doctors – including a consultant in pain management – remotely.

That means I can’t be prodded, poked or pin-cushioned, the docs just have to use their best guess to come up with a treatment plan. I have been prescribed strong painkillers that do almost nothing to combat the pain, so I’m taking less and less of them.

All of that adds up to very, very bad days when things flare, which seems to be every couple of days. When that happened on Friday after posting the thread, I lost track of the good things.

My mood nose-dived and the day got bleaker and bleaker from the early afternoon to the evening. I eventually had to go to bed at 7.30 because it was the only place I could be without my back hurting. When I was lying in bed, struggling to control my pain and my emotions, everything was bleak and awful, everything was dark and clouded. There was no brightness, no chink of light as I’d described it. Only black.

The following morning, with things a little brighter and pain a little lower, I chastised myself for losing sight of the brightness. I was angry with myself that I wasn’t practising what I preached.

It was only later in the day that I realised how unproductive that was. Why tell myself off for being overwhelmed by negativity? Why increase those negative feelings by beating myself up for feeling them in the first place?

This runs to the core of my beliefs: kindness to oneself. Kindness of thought and kindness of action.

Smiling through things isn’t just about the mantra of looking for light, it’s about the experience of battling against darkness.

Let’s agree, then, that even if we can’t find the light today, we can look again tomorrow. To repeat my favourite quote (which many people will be sick of hearing):

“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day that says, ‘I will try again tomorrow.'”

Mary Anne Radmacher