Some thoughts on bravery, failure and rejection

The terrifying audacity of going after what you want

So winter has arrived.

As temperatures dipped below freezing and snow apparently fell in London (my friend said so, I didn't spot the falling flakes myself), I've been feeling thoroughly irritated by the cold. I toddle to and from Peckham in a wool coat, a blazer, a knitted hat, scarf and clompy boots and still feel like my fingers and toes slowly turning into ice cubes. 

When I tried to moan about the weather to a guy I know recently, he informed me that he had done three winters in Moscow and this was nothing. He told me that in Moscow, it can be minus 30 degrees (good God) and when it's that cold you can't even breathe outside, the air is too frigid to inhale. So let’s be thankful for temperatures above freezing and count me out of any wintry trips to Russia’s capital.

I have been thinking about bravery recently. Actually, I think about bravery a lot. It's one of my favourite traits in a person. If I don't consider someone brave, it’s pretty much impossible for me to admire them. 

One Thanksgiving when I was in America, my flatmate had this silly card game with these intimate questions that were also a bit soppy. For example, a card might read, 'Name a place you are thankful for' or 'What does your perfect Saturday look like?' One of the questions was, 'Name the bravest person you know'.

I really liked that one and had so many candidates for it. So did she. Funnily enough for both of us (she was also in recovery), all our choices were people who had got sober. It made me consider the bravery of recovery. I think getting sober from drugs and/or alcohol requires a great deal of bravery - addressing and changing anything that blights your life, whether that's compulsive spending or comfort eating, does.

That's partly because all of these addictions and compulsions and tendencies are a bit embarrassing to own up to. It takes bravery to admit you need help. In my experience, people in recovery are brave in other areas of their lives too. So many of the people I've crossed paths with in the rooms truly do march to the beat of their own drum. They are often pursuing unconventional careers or living a life that may look strange to the outside world but is perfectly right for them. It takes bravery to live your life like that and not worry what the chattering masses may think. 

All this is to say that I have long considered myself quite a brave person. I think getting sober was a brave thing to do. I think pursuing a career in journalism was also brave (this could also be classed as a lunatic move - there's quite an overlap between bravery and lunacy). Moving to New York without knowing a soul was brave. As is writing about my personal life in national newspapers. So yes, for a while I have congratulated myself on being brave. 

That is, until I was sitting on the upper deck of a bus recently (does anyone else find buses very conducive to thinking? much, much better than the tube or the train in my experience) and an unpleasant realisation swum into my head.

I have never once told someone that I liked them. I have never summoned up the courage to tell someone that I had feelings for them. Never, in all my 36 years of life on this earth, have I mustered up the bravery to make the first move. I've always shirked it. 

There have been at least two men in my life - these are the ones that come to mind, I'm sure if I scrabbled back into my catalogue of crushes I could find more - that I have felt something quite deep for yet have simply not been brave enough to squeak it out. It was horrid to consider this limitation, especially as someone who has for a long time congratulated herself, quite superciliously, on being brave. 

"How can I think I'm all that brave if the very possibility of rejection has been enough to silence me?" I thought. 

Because that's what stops me, that horrid, hideous, heinous R word. Like all human beings on this planet, I fucking hate rejection. And the thought of one of these decent men (the ones I've truly cared for have been decent) looking uncomfortable and telling me they don't feel the same way - well, it makes me want to shrivel up and emit terrible sounds of agony. 

But here's the thing - if you don't risk rejection, you also don't risk getting the thing you desire.

I have endured an awful rejection before. 

For as long as I can remember I have wanted to write a book. A proper book. A book that you can buy in a bookshop and place on a shelf. A book that you can open and read and - fingers crossed - enjoy. A novel. I've wanted to write one and see it published ever since, I suspect, I was a child with her nose forever in a book. 

And here's the thing, dear Substackers. I got tantalisingly close. When I left university, I attended - paid for by my father - a course on how to write a novel. This course has since produced several bestselling novelists. 

I enjoyed the course very much and, at the end, we had something called a 'showcase' where we all read out extracts from our work in progress to an audience studded with literary agents. 

I read out my extract - a snippet of the prologue of the novel I was working on which was very much informed by my obsession with Donna Tartt's The Secret History - and incredibly, two agents contacted me saying they would be interested in reading more and representing me. I went with one of them and then settled down to the hair-pulling hell that was writing that novel. 

Maybe I just wasn't ready. Maybe the idea was not right. Maybe I hadn't seen enough of life, at 23 years old. But it was a rotten experience. The novel just didn't work and the more I tried to make it work, the more it sagged and slumped out of my control. The structure was wonky. The characters thin. But now I look back, I can see that I had lost interest in it a long time before and any reader of the manuscript could, I'm sure, tell.

However, I finished it and my agent sent it out to a clutch of publishing houses and a round of rejections came flooding in. They were, in truth, nice rejections, with comments about my writing style and I recall that we even went to meet with one of the editors for ideas of how to make the book work… but, all the same, the rejection stung. 

I carried it with me. I stopped writing fiction. For a long while, I stopped writing anything. I got a job at a bookshop and devoted myself to my main hobby, drinking (which had been my main hobby all along really). I lost all confidence. It felt silly that I had ever thought I could write a book. I let the rejection kill the dream. 

Or rather, the rejection redirected the dream for a time. The desire shifted from being an author to being a journalist. I burned with ambition to become one. I shelved creative writing and focussed instead on making my way onto a national newspaper. 

And I did that and I don't regret it and it's been great fun but, you know what, it's never quite dislodged that dream of writing a book. Because that's the thing I've wanted the most, from day dot. 

And slowly, slowly, my confidence has come back. 

Some of that is thanks to journalism. Since going freelance, I've had a little more room to write pieces that I want to write in the way I want to write them. The feedback has been encouraging. I started to remember that, actually, I was quite good at this writing lark. 

Some of the confidence has returned thanks to this Substack and the people who read it, their kind comments and the sometimes grinding but almost certainly useful practice of getting one of these out each Sunday come rain or shine (which I really am trying to do!). 

Perhaps it's also summoning up some bravery, that quality I see in such abundance in the rooms, that 'try and try again' resilience that I suspect is the only true antidote to rejection. Grit, other people would call it.

All this is to say - I've started writing (I hope) a book. I'm superstitious and terrified so I'm not going to say anything more about it except to tell you that I'm excited and nerve-wracked and thankful and who fucking knows, maybe I'll tell someone I like them too. We shall see. 

EXTRA BITS 

We're the demisexuals - you might be one too 

I was oversharing in the pages of The Times this week in case you missed it. It's all about this idea of the “demisexual” - please don’t roll your eyes! - who is someone who has to feel an emotional connection to a person before they can feel sexually attracted to them. It's in the newspapers because rapper Tulisa said she's one on I'm A Celebrity. I wish I'd had a little more time to ponder and write but sadly as it was on edition - when the editor wants the copy in time for next day's paper - I was rather rushed though I am glad I managed to squeeze in one of the truest adages I have heard about sex - For men, sex is like pizza, bad pizza is still pretty great. For women, sex is like sushi, bad sushi can be a traumatising experience. 

I went on a Colleen Hoover binge 

I loved reading Pandora Sykes’s take on the novels of Coleen Hoover, the current queen of BookTok. 

As someone who has wondered about Hoover’s phenomenal success but not read any of her books - I tried to read It Ends With Us and I didn’t get past the first 20 pages, not because it was bad, it just wasn’t really my thing and I got distracted - I found Sykes’s analysis of why they’ve been such a runaway success fascinating.

What stuck out to me was her point that Hoover’s characters all work very hard. There’s no rich loafers or nepo babies in her oeuvre by the sounds of it:

No-one makes a quick buck, no-one works in marketing or digital media, everyone has wholly respectable jobs: pilot, teacher, nurse, neurosurgeon, small business owner and they work long hours.

Sykes says that after a spell in Hoover’s universe, she realised how fatigued she was with the usual books about “messy middle-class women”. It really did make me think. It’s true, isn’t it? Almost all the novels lining the shelves are about the trials and tribulations of the middle and upper classes. What do you think? 

Heretic 

This film answers a question I never thought to ask, but yes, it turns out I do fancy Hugh Grant even when he’s playing a craggy-faced serial killer. 

Heretic is about two nice Mormon missionary girls who knock on the door of a house they really, really shouldn’t knock on the door of. 

It’s brilliant fun - gives you some proper scares (I was watching through my fingers at certain points) and does actually make you think a little. There’s a great scene that involves Hugh Grant’s character opining on Monopoly before singing a snippet of Radiohead’s Creep that is now lodged in my memory. 

But really the film works because it’s a showcase for Hugh Grant who, for my money, picks the most interesting characters in film today. He himself has said that he’s in the “freakshow” period of his career and I’m transfixed. 

TikTok chocolate and sweets 

Have you ever dipped a toe into CandyTok? 

I went to a lunch thing hosted by TikTok this week and in the goody bag there were a couple of confectionary items that have gone viral on the platform. 

One was a bag of sour gummy sweets that were so good and so more-ish I had to unload them on some pals.

The other was a thing called “Dubai chocolate” which is like a doorstop of chocolate - dusted gold, very “Dubai” - filled with a pistachio cream lining that, guys, was so good even now I have a craving for it. 

I suspect that this doorstop of chocolate was supposed to be portioned out but of course I came home and munched my way through the entire thing. It was bloody delicious! It also bequeathed me two angry spots on my chin.

But if you are in the market for something chocolatey and delicious, then Dubai chocolate has my hearty recommendation - and from what I can understand, the Big Daddy bar at M & S is a high street version of it. 

That’s it from me for now. I hope you are well and warm. See you next week xxx