FAILING YOURSELF, ALWAYS 

I edited Gordon Hall’s episode when I was going through one of those periods where I decided to give up on love, again. Periodically, when my efforts in this area of my life go unrewarded or unnoticed, I give myself a break just so I don’t feel like a complete failure all of the time. And so, in the context of them talking about how they moved to upstate New York, and applied for a few things but that they could “take it or leave it”[i], when I heard them talk about how, “the weight lifted off me not just like, oh, I need to make this happen, but the shame of not being able to have what I want, or like failing.”[ii], I immediately related to the weight of this “shame of not being able to have what I want, or, like, failing.”[iii]

         And I’m not saying I don’t feel like a failure in my career, because I do, I just think I’ve gotten used to it perhaps; built up a tolerance to it. I’ve had so many failures and so many successes in my career and so now I can see them in some perspective and know that they usually balance out somehow. I remember, one day when I was in my last year of grad school, I got five rejections from grants and residencies in one day, but then the next day a friend offered me an exhibition opportunity. That doesn’t seem like balance, but it’s the best I’ve found, and I feel lucky for it.

         Several weeks ago, I went to a seminar about Imposter Syndrome, mostly to hang out with my friend Cat and to shop around for any insecure hotties. Again, it’s not that I don’t feel like I have Imposter Syndrome, because I do, it’s just that it comes in waves, and at the moment I’m feeling pretty good about myself. I think one reason, one major reason, why I’m feeling good is because I have funding now. When I entered into my PhD programme at Oxford, I did not have funding, but in the Spring of my first year (several months after the majority of the interviews for the podcast were recorded) I found out that my Arts and Humanities Research Council Studentship funding bid had been successful. I walk along the Thames near my home in Oxford often and walking along the path after I got funding felt very different than before. I felt I belonged finally, because someone wanted me here enough that they were willing to pay for me to stay. Before I knew that I belonged because I had been accepted into the programme, but I didn’t feel like I belonged… and I definitely felt like a failure.

         In this Imposter Syndrome workshop the facilitator asked us to list our failures, place them alongside our successes in our CV and then choose the failures that felt particularly painful. Immediately I recognized that the failures that felt particularly painful where the ones where I was rejected because I didn’t fit the mold of an artist enough, or the mold of a writer enough, or the mold of an academic enough. This is something that I have spoken to Gordon about several times over the years, and each time I find their words insightful and comforting. When they told me about how prior to dividing their work, not by discipline or form or medium, but by past and current, they

… even still, sometimes I’ll be like, well… you know, I’m sure you have this, I am an artist but compared to other artists, I don’t make as much work as they do, or have as many shows as they do. And I’m a writer, but compared to other writers, like I haven’t written a book, and I don’t publish all the time, and I’m not an academic, and I’m basically bad at that too. And I do this curatorial work, but like compared to other people who do it, it’s very scrappy, and infrequent. So basically, I just do a lot of stuff, and I’m bad at all of them. That was the spiral. I don’t really have this anymore, but I had it a lot, especially starting out, you know? [iv]

         How is feeling like you are failing yourself different than feeling like a failure? Nicole Morris also mentioned something about failure in our conversation. She was speaking about how having a child, “clears that tunnel vision, it clears it. Because it's like, you don't want a life that's just perpetually like you're failing yourself, always.”[v]

         Are there ways we have built up a resilience to feeling like a failure? We have collected mantras about how bad it is to compare yourself to others (my personal favorite is from Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata poem that was sitting in my kitchen growing up sneaking into my subconscious to the point where now I can quote it, “If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.”[vi]) and had conversations with friends and colleagues that allow us to recategorize individual failures as systemic failures, but what do you do with this feeling that you are failing yourself, always? Oof. What do you do with the weight of the shame around not being able to get what you want? Can you manage these feelings by taking time off, taking time away, distancing yourself from them through time?

         Immediately before Nicole mentioned this, she was speaking about self-care and time, and how before she had her daughter Ula, she found it hard to take time off. Nicole said,

Like, definitely I remember when, like, before I had Ula, like, having a weekend off was like such a really abstract and difficult concept, like, I found it really hard. I was like, I can't possibly take two days off, so I would always just have one. And even that day was hard, where it'd be all around, like, have I done enough, you know? I could have gone to see a show, you know dadadada. It's like a really unhealthy relationship with yourself and, you know, time. But then when you have a child, like, all your time is off all of a sudden, but it's not at all. It’s a totally different job. But then, but then that's kind of interesting as well. So, then you become this onlooker. So, you see, like, I have plenty of friends that have a terrible relationship with selfcare, and, you know, work all the time.[vii]

         I think there is a connection here between needing time to distance yourself from these feelings of having failed yourself but having, like Nicole said, a “terrible relationship with self-care… [including an] unhealthy relationship with yourself and, you know, time.”[viii]

         This is something that Fiona Reilly spoke about in our interview. Fiona, in addition to being a friend, someone who I’ve interviewed, the artist who made all of the cover art for the episodes of the podcast, and someone who occasionally phrases things like “this thing we call X” which I directly lifted for the title of this podcast and archive, is also someone who I’m in a collaborative project with alongside Lise Skou, Pam Grombacher and Sasha Richter (all of whom I’ve interviewed for this project, and who all have excerpts from their interviews in the Archive). We’re currently working on a book together, and to generate writing we began responding to Collective Memory Work prompts. As defined by Dr. Karin Hansson,

Collective Memory-Work can be described as a means to reach a general understanding of a phenomenon by starting the investigation from an understanding of the individual’s experiences. To achieve this, one begins by describing conscious individual memories. Thereafter a collective analysis of each memory by the group is intended to detect the underlying conflicts and to identify the cultural norms and behaviours involved, the reason for the memory becoming a memory (Willig, 2013). The method focuses on Husserl’s idea that memories are often just remembered because of strong experiences of encountering different structuring norms. The memories are not interesting in themselves, but as examples of situations that contain various kinds of structurally determined conflicts.[ix]

  One of our prompts was to write about a memory where we feel like we worked enough. I won’t share their writing (because I haven’t gotten their permission), but I would like to share something from my response to this prompt, and then end with a transcription of Fiona’s interview excerpt in the archive.

         In response to “write about a memory where we feel like we worked enough”, I wrote,

She found it difficult to find the beginnings and ends of things. Once she asked her friend when he knew a painting was done, and he said, “Why do bands break up?” She wished that there was an instrument she could craft that could calculate the exact amount of time a task should take in relation to its value and in the context of the other things on the docket. It would beep when the task is done, and you could put that away knowing that you did your best with the time allotted and the energy and resources you had. She majored in Painting though, not in Art and Technology, so she can’t actually make this tool. Instead, she just carries on with a task until it’s over. Many things take longer than they should, but some things stay in their place. Usually, one or two things are done poorly, but that’s ok. It’s hard to keep things together and everyone is allowed some mistakes.[x]

In my interview with Fiona, I asked her why she makes work about time, and she responded,

I think because it's the main example for me, of how fuckin’ absurd the world is, like, there's this thing that we call time, but we don't really know what it is. But yet it totally dictates nearly every aspect of our lives. So, like how can you even begin to comprehend that? I feel like maybe art can be a way to tackle that. But then that's really problematic, because I am the worst at internalizing that kind of time management logic, you know?

Like, last night, I was like, “Okay, I'm not Skyping Kelly till 11. So, I'll get up at eight, and I'll have a shower, and I'll bring my maternity benefit forms to the dole office, and then I'll have that job done before I talk to her. And then after I talk to her, I can do a couple of hours in the studio and have dinner ready for Aiden early, so that we still have the evening, and we can sort out the studio because we need to turn it into a nursery…” I was like, “Yeah!” And then when I woke up this morning, I had a nosebleed and a headache and I just couldn't function. So I stayed in bed but I spent the whole time staying in bed going, “Oh God, I should have done my day, I had this planned. And oh, God, no, I'm going to have to go to the dole office after I’ve talked to Kelly and that's gonna take up my whole... Oh God time, ahhhh.”

So why time? 'Cause… it's a coping mechanism. Making work about time is a way for me to deal with this thing that we call time that causes so many problems. Yeah, so just the feeling of always having to monopolize it, always having to use it to its best you know, like, get the most out of it. And really, this really productive, like Neoliberal ideology applied to human experience, you know? Like, time is just human experience. Yeah, that's it. Time is a bit like art, really, I suppose. It's just a bit silly.[xi]

Kelly Lloyd

[i] “Interview with Gordon Hall” Kelly Lloyd. February 15, 2021. https://www.thisthingwecallart.com/podcast/gordon-hall

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] “Interview with Nicole Morris” Kelly Lloyd. February 25, 2021. https://www.thisthingwecallart.com/podcast/nicole-morris

[vi] Max Ehrmann, “Desiderata” All Poetry. https://allpoetry.com/desiderata---words-for-life (Accessed March 19, 2022)

[vii] “Interview with Nicole Morris” Kelly Lloyd. February 25, 2021. https://www.thisthingwecallart.com/podcast/nicole-morris

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Karin Hansson, “Remembering (Art) Work: Collective Memory-Work in Higher Arts Education and Research”, Other Education: The Journal of Educational Alternatives, Volume 9, Issue 1 (2020). https://www.othereducation.org/index.php/OE/article/view/256 (Accessed March 19, 2022)

[x] Kelly Lloyd, “A Time When I Worked Enough”.  April 13, 2021.

[xi] “Interview with Fiona Reilly” Kelly Lloyd. May 22, 2019. https://www.thisthingwecallart.com/archive/fiona-reilly