Part Two: The Pedestal Problem

‘If you’re put on a pedestal, you’re supposed to behave like a pedestal type of person. Pedestals actually have a limited circumference. Not much room to move around.’

Margaret Atwood

February 2022

Hi there, welcome back to my thoughts on failing! Ok, so we’ve established the not-at-all-ground-breaking news that no one is really qualified for anything because to be qualified means to be completely prepared for, and experienced in, a multitude of scenarios related to one event or subject.

Any situation involving humans is going to be totally unique, no two relationships, friendships, interactions or life events will be similar enough that you could call yourself qualified. That makes mistakes, and failures, inevitable. To start seeing yourself as unqualified for most things in life gives you the opportunity to learn, and it normalises evolution and growth.

Most failings are not that bad, as a friend used to say, if I was overreacting over some small mistake I’d made, “at least no one died”. In my case, that was true every time, so why does our world feel like it’s come crashing down when we mess up? Here’s one reason:

We put people on pedestals. We put ourselves on pedestals.

Putting people on pedestals is dangerous; they either stay balanced precariously, unattainable perfect statues not moving or living, or they move and live their lives and they fall off. When we put people on a pedestal, when we see them as morally better than us, as too good for us, as ‘perfect’, we not only underestimate and undervalue ourselves unfairly but we also don’t give them any room for their inevitable failures. When you’re not expecting failure from someone, (whether it’s a parent, partner, friend, or colleague) their failings seem ten times as bad and hurt us ten times as much. We can feel betrayed, hurt, confused, and angered to a much greater extent because we expected them to maintain this perfect façade. We didn’t allow them to be human. We are less likely to be able to forgive them because first we must get our heads around their fallibility.

Putting ourselves on pedestals looks like this:

You put too much pressure on yourself to be ‘perfect’, it goes beyond just holding yourself to a high standard (as one might want to do, always wanting to be your best self) and becomes unattainable and unsustainable. Consequently, when you do make mistakes, you feel embarrassment, shame, guilt, and regret, deeply.

When we are young, we naturally run away from those feelings. Children often don’t own up to their failings: “It wasn’t me who broke the plant pot!” or “It’s not true the mean things I allegedly said to my sister!”. Gradually we learn about consequences, taking responsibility for our actions, apologising and making amends.

This is important to learn, but what is more important to learn is WHY we need to do all those things. In not owning up (to those milder failings, and bigger ones later down the line), facing the appropriate consequences (which is obviously horribly difficult if the stakes are high), and apologising and making amends, we are condemning ourselves to a life of stagnation, of wallowing in our failings, and of perpetuating the damaging belief that ordinary, lovely, kind, and brilliant people do not fail.

They do fail.

Ordinary, lovely, kind, creative, brilliant people fail. Consistently. It doesn’t make them any less brilliant, it just makes them human.

If you liked, or loved, that person before their mistake, you probably still like/love them, you just don’t like this messy part of them which was previously hidden. We are revealing brilliant, funny, unexpected things to people all the time, and because failures are the minority of our actions, they seem to loom over everything else.

You are still likeable and loveable despite your failures, you’re the same person but with a little more uncovered. Now you have an opportunity to improve, to become more wholly you despite the bad bits that are often coaxed out of the shadows by hurt, anger, stress, confusion, and circumstance.

We might reflect on our teenage years, when failures often seemed enormous due to our blinkered perspective on the world. Mistakes that feel catastrophic happen because life is enormously complicated and there are those infinite combinations and factors that I mentioned when you add humans into the mix. As we get older, we naturally gain perspective, and we learn how to deal with mistakes and not to let them tear us apart by seeing them within a much broader context.

To understand failing as normal, natural, and often the best way to learn, we need to not only gain perspective but take people, and ourselves, off the pedestals.

Ps. Part three is about the power of being ‘good enough’ …. see you then x