Try and fail, but don’t fail to try

CAN DO ATTITUDE Live your best life and embrace the emotional roller-coaster of existence.


The Cast Stone
Michael Gallagher

I never did ten consecutive days in secondary school. That’s a pathetic statistic, but it’s absolutely true. I spent almost every waking hour during my teenage years developing strategies to stay in bed in the mornings while other kids were headed for school. Some of the things I came up with defied logic and stretched imagination, but it was good preparation for storytelling later in life.
You may ask why this occurred and it took me quite a while to understand it myself but when realisation arrived it was truly a lightbulb moment. I now understand that the vast majority of my time on earth has been blighted by fear of rejection, which sounds crazy given my profession, but I will try and put it into words.
I never put myself in a position where I would try my best, where I would expose my true feelings and ability and be told I wasn’t good enough. Instead, I made certain there was always an escape hatch, always an excuse if I didn’t make the grade or achieve what I should. I could write a book on self-sabotage and how to live a safe life, where my heart or my emotions were never exposed.
When I was a teenager, the discos were still mostly ‘Ballroom of Romance’ style set-ups with the girls on one side and us boyos on the other. We’d do a bit of hopping around to Billy Ocean, Queen or The Bangles and then things would calm down for a moment and we’d know the slow-set was on the way. We’d be looking across the hall towards the girls, admiring their perms and shoulder pads and they’d be eyeing us asking one another: “Are those eejits looking at us?”
Then, the opening bars of ‘Lady in Red’ or ‘Take my Breath Away’ would crank up and the great charge across the floor would begin. The girls would all make a mad dash towards the toilets to escape the rush and 20 or 30 of them would make it to the sanctuary of the restroom while the rest would be picked off like gazelles being hunted by lions on the African plains.
While all of this was occurring I would almost always be on the other side of the hall because I was scared of being rejected by the girl I liked. I couldn’t bear the thought of letting her know that I liked her in case she didn’t feel the same, so I never made it obvious. Sometimes, in quiet moments, I still regret that.
It was the same in sport. I was a moderately talented footballer with the chance of being a Mayo minor. Of course, I could never try my best to make the squad as I had to have an escape clause. Therefore, the night before the final trial for the North Mayo squad I went out and got terribly drunk. The following morning the local selector Eamon Munnelly picked me up in Bangor and I joined the Erris group headed for Ballina.
Pathetically, I was so hungover that Eamon had to stop the van during the journey to let me get sick. I managed to recover enough to play in the match in Ballina and was picked for the North Mayo squad but as the season went on, I was deservedly found out and discarded.
Of course, I had the psychological fall-back that I hadn’t tried my best, so I got a crazy type of comfort from that. However, in the intervening years I regretted every moment of my stupidity. If only I had tried my best, if only I had asked the girl to dance, if only I had got out of bed and gone to school, if only, if only, if only.
It drove me crazy for years and had a major impact on my life for quite a while. I constantly wondered how life would have unfolded if I had been honest with myself and gambled with my feelings. That frustration stayed with me for decades, but it’s gone now.
Now, I urge people to learn from my mistakes and to live without fear. I urge them to be brave and embrace life – it won’t always work out perfectly, but they won’t spend decades wondering and wishing. I urge them to live life without regrets and take chances. I urge them to live their best life and embrace the emotional roller-coaster of existence. (By the way, the headline on the column is a quote from former American President, John Quincy Adams).