Ambitious Failures
photo by William E Evans, © 2020
In Medium’s PS I Love You, Katherine Hart wrote a piece that landed close to home. The man she married and raised two children with was a dreamer. Evidently, an unsuccessful one, judging from the story. It’s not clear if he had ever succeeded, but what is clear is she’s not hanging around any longer to watch.
Sad story for all concerned.
Some might say she’s recovering—reconstituting herself, and seen that way the story has a positive spin. Perhaps. Though there’s no going back to reclaim that part of her life spent waiting for him to–what–succeed? accept defeat? become a different person? And when she walks, what happens to him? Does he correct course? And the kids? Always the kids.
I Realized I Would Never Be Enough for My Husband “The Greatest Showman” revealed the elephants in our marriage
“He sat on the couch, complaining about an expensive business venture which had failed. His biggest failure to date. It had cost us thousands, a price which sat unspoken between us. Another elephant in the room of our marriage.
“ ‘If people had backed it more it would have worked! We need to move somewhere that people are more supportive of forward thinking ideas. This town is too stuck in its ways.’
“I felt sorry for him in that moment. I saw his future laid out like a set of tarot cards. He was going to lose it all. I knew it would never be enough. Nothing would.”
from I Realized I Would Never Be Enough for My Husband by Katherine Hart
For every success story–Elon Musk, for example—there’s an army of other folks who miss the high bar, and any number of spouses and children required to suffer the consequences along with them. And that’s just life. Actors who drive cabs and wait tables from youth into adulthood, aging athletes who never qualified for the Olympic trials–those who never tried even sadder–and writers who never are published.
Edgar Allan Poe was deemed a failure in his day–though he seems to be making a late comeback. Give yourself a couple hundred years, you’ll see. The eternal optimist who can’t stop striving is the classic moral of never giving up, but, but, but…
“I’d taken my girls and a friend to the movies. “The Greatest Showman” was playing and my girls and I love musicals so it was an easy pick. The movie was impressive, with big dance acts and catchy songs but halfway through I found myself crying. I was watching my own life, my marriage, play out on the big screen.”
from I Realized I Would Never Be Enough for My Husband by Katherine Hart
The movie, The Greatest Showman, was a story about P. T. Barnum of circus fame. As Ms. Hart describes it, Barnum loses his wife to his ambition, realizes what he’s done, and wins her back again, classic Hollywood. But being in the state of mind that she was while writing the story, Hart doesn’t view it as fulfillment, only that Barnum’s wife let him run over her. She returns a second time to the theater bringing her husband, hoping he’ll connect the dots. He does, only not the way she’d hoped. The magic ending doesn’t happen for Hart.
“PT Barnum’s wife was an idiot. I hated her in that moment. I hated that Hollywood had offered me up a weak walkover of a woman as an example to follow. She was treated like rubbish and then forgave and went back to him. All the anger towards my husband was now turned on a fictional character.”
from I Realized I Would Never Be Enough for My Husband by Katherine Hart
Like I said, a sad story.
A theme running through the American mythology is of the climb to the top. Known as a foundational story. Quite a few subscribe to it. But the more furiously you race up the hill, the less time you have to notice the landscape. You probably shouldn’t sit on a stump all day smoking pot waiting on lightning to strike, but the opposite is true as well.
Each creature is given a set number of days and hours to spend how they will; the pace and the focus is the question. What you are left with is what you discovered along the way—and what you’ve passed along.
I had a dream last night. D and I were walking to attend a public performance of some sort. Moving through the crowd, I recognized Bill Morris–a running buddy from the 80s. We weren’t the closest, but he was awake in his life and had a wickedly wry sense of humor.
Along with Barbara Frech, he and I did hill repeats every Thursday evening through sleet and snow on a steep hill overlooking Bluemont Park. Start at the bottom and race the quarter mile or so to the top, turn, jog down the hill, turn around and go again, no pausing, sucking wind while building stamina for hill climbing. My best race at a 10-miler was the Lynchburg 10-miler, a ball-breaking roller coaster course with its last mile and a half climb to the finish line. When you can kick in the last mile on an uphill course, you’re in healthy mental shape.
The hill we worked out our legs, lungs and hearts on is still there, though now at the top sits a retirement home that’s gone through bankruptcy.
In the dream, I called out to Bill, he turned, and we reconnected. End of scene. What was it my memory was trying to tell me? He belonged to a time in my life when I was pouring spare energy into becoming a better runner, pursuing the dream, even though I knew I would never make it to the big time, and that wasn’t even the point. What mattered was the effort, the mental stamina, and the handful of training runs in freezing rain, or 100-degree summer days, the handful of races when I could do no wrong.
My ex-wife said she thought I was running away from her. Yes, we both knew our marriage was failing, and it seemed to her I was replacing it while leaving her and our sons. It had nothing to do with that; she misread my motivations, or perhaps applied the best explanation she could.
In her article, Ms. Hart doesn’t delve too deeply into her own backstory, what originally drew her to him, other than when he was initially pursuing her with his special gift of focus–that or she’d simply overlooked an obvious streak of magical thinking in her spouse. She admits it was the spark she’d once found attractive, then woke one day and it hit her like Paul riding to Damascus.
When had it gone from special gift to failure? Had she chosen to overlook it? And had she subjugated what she herself needed in a life to support his–leaving her own dreams unfulfilled?
Some people dream and others seek lives of certainty–ambition, what is that?
You feel dreams aren’t her specialty. I can’t tell from Ms. Hart’s story whether her spouse was driven by what’s essential for success, or he was unable to judge his abilities and adjust to reality. The great philosopher detective, Dirty Harry, once said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”
“His voice took on a familiar tone. ‘You want me just to give up my dreams and stay in a job I hate?’ I knew where this was heading and braced myself.
‘No, that’s not what I mean at all.’ The same conversation, so many times. ‘I just want you to see that the grass isn’t greener all the time. Make the most of what we have right now. Here.’
“He shook his head, confused. He couldn’t see it. The moment of awareness passed. The elephant in the room returned—I would never be enough.”
from I Realized I Would Never Be Enough for My Husband by Katherine Hart
My theory is that true dilettante dreamers don’t have strong enough survival instincts. As Steven Pressfield says, “You have to do the work.” He also says, “Listen to the Muse.” But what drives people, goads us to do better than we did yesterday, that internal fire keeps us warm enough to get out of bed in the morning.
I don’t know what my life would be without dreams. It’s brought me this far. Yet Darwin said evolution is the story of a million dead ends. I remind myself life is just that basic, just that hard, yet still keep a sense of humor about it. You can choose to stay safely cocooned at home, or go crazy cliffs diving, intending to fly–or run the gamut between. And of course it doesn’t matter which–except to yourself and those closest who might be watching.
I was shocked–hurt, really–when the new boss said I wouldn’t finish my career in architecture in the firm I had helped found thirty years earlier. Falling back on my only other talent, I starting writing for survival–for my emotional rescue, as Mick Jagger sardonically put it.
Lately, the Muse has been whispering, “Now that’s a story—protagonist and villain—waiting to be written.! Never piss off a writer.