The Māori KETO-nic

Alternative titles include:   

 "When the fat lady can’t sing…

Easily distracted and could do better… 

Someone slap me...

 There is no mathematical equation, or recipe, or to-do-list that tells you what to put in to a person from birth, that will result in the child with essential skills.  One, you can send off into the world with confidence, who has expertise in survival and emotional maturity.  They—these children—need the ability to feed and clothe themselves, fit themselves into society and also the capacity not to fall apart when failure comes a knocking.

Because, as we all know, failure, in one of its myriad forms, will always come a knocking.  

It will beat down the front door and we will be forced to invite it in to live with us (for indeterminable periods of time).  It will eat all our food, take long showers that use all our hot water and laze on our couch hogging the remote control as it flicks through the channels.  It will use all the internet bandwidth downloading porn and it will invite its friends over, anxiety, depression and despair to party.

Failure is a thing.  It is a real live thing that we, all of us—ALL OF US—have to contend with at one time or another. 

However, there is another thing, a force way more devastating than failure that you need skills to navigate, more skills in fact. 

That, of course, is success.

I have had success, a few times, but me being me—the thickie—ran away from it.  In fact, I usually responded with a manic episode, breakdown and depression.  Yeah I know, what is that all about?  I’ve worked it out over the years.  I think that I do not like success, even though I strive for it, when it happens, I freak out. 

I know deep down in my gut it is because I don’t believe I am capable of it and thus, when it happens I consequently believe I do not deserve it and it is all a monstrous mistake and the Hogwarts letter went to the wrong address.  Which leads on to the fact that when it happens I don’t believe it is happening and when people tell me it’s happened I think they are all lying.  Also, I think that if I can do it, achieve it, receive it then any old schmuck with half a brain and an opposable thumb can.  

Many years ago I’d sent some short stories off to a publisher on a whim, because writing, as far as I knew, was the only thing I was any good at to a competitive degree.  The publisher did not only accept the stories; they wrote back quickly, begging for more.  So, what did I do in the face of this enthusiasm for my work?  I immediately had a mental breakdown of epic proportion which was horrifically, devastatingly, Armageddon-ly, crippling. 

I neither replied to their letter, nor any of the subsequent ones.  Thus I never gave them permission to publish what I had sent or sent them more. 

I froze, paralysed and incapable of dealing with any of it or anything else.  Thus a chance didn’t just pass me by, it ran away, after I'd put big black doc martins and stomped all over it.

Straight after this bizarre brush with (okay not so much a brush with as a hasty retreat from) success, all sorts of other things, awful things, happened. 

I lost my amazingly cool job (not my fault this time) and then worse, I was shipped off to file citizenship and passport applications, in alpha numeric order, down a dark hole in a government basement file room filled with vermin, (and not just the mice and cockroach kind) and my boyfriend left me for someone else, someone younger, blonder and eminently more suitable.

So I totally lost my marbles, and this was the first really bad episode, in the uppy then downy cycle of nuttyville I still navigate today.  But at that time I had no feck'n clue what it was apart from my total uselessness.

The thing is, we think failure guts you.  No, it doesn’t.  When you totally fuck up help is all around you and no matter how deep you've dug yourself into it, shit can always be climbed out of.  Failure is a natural phenomenon and it is there to teach us things, hard lessons we will never learn any other way.

Success however is an internal nightmare for people like me.  I am allergic to it.  It gives me hives.  I know how insane this sounds but success is not happiness.   True happiness is what you have while you are striving for something.  That is when you are in balance, aligned, and your spirit, body and mind are all chugging away and headed in the same direction.

Success to me is like the lotto.  If I ever won I’d give it all away, I can’t deal with that kind of drama in my life, I know for certain I’d end up inside a bouncy walled room...