Dust Yourself Off

‘Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement’ – C.S. Lewis

I’m coming up to what might be my last singing performance at school and I felt it was finally time to sing a song that actually meant something to me. That’s why I chose ‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free’ by Nina Simone. This song is my Desert Island disc every time because it’s the song my parents played to me when I didn’t get to be school officer in sixth form. When they first played it to me years before to get me to sing it, it didn’t mean anything; I didn’t understand it and I didn’t think it was any good. But suddenly, it meant something to me and I understood what she was singing about. She may have been singing about black civil rights in America, but the sentiment was the same: failure. It was failure to be equal, failure to be noticed, failure to succeed at school, failure in whatever you were attempting.

        I listen to this song whenever I fail at something I really wanted, which is more often than I would like to admit. My parents have found me crying listening to it on numerous occasions: when I didn’t get through to the next round of a singing competition, when I got rejected by York University, after another shit driving lesson. It doesn’t make it any less painful, it just makes me more willing to get up and keep going. I’ve had these failures because I’ve persisted in trying. If I ever stopped trying then I’d never get that moment of success that I crave.

        I know I’m not the only one that feels like most of the time they never get what they want or try for, but it often feels like I fall down more often than most. It makes it really hard to just get up and keep going, to try again. It feels like I’ll never get there and I’m lagging behind everyone else. There seems to be certain people who get everything, who never even have to try, and I am definitely not one of them. But I can’t look at them and consider myself to be below them or I’ll never get there. My other favourite song is Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Everyone’s Free to Wear Sunscreen’ and in that he says ‘don’t waste your time on jealousy, sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind; the race is long, and in the end it’s only with yourself’. This quote gets me through every moment of my life, especially in sixth form when you’re actually judged against each other in grades.

        The Baz Luhrmann song is one that I was also played before and just wanted my parents to shut up and leave me alone because I was FINE. But like Nina’s Simone’s song, it suddenly made sense when I needed it. I think with the ‘Sunscreen’ song you have to be ready, you have to NEED it. If you don’t need it or understand it, you haven’t experienced failure or feeling inadequate. In this way, I think that song is magical, because it doesn’t work if you aren’t ready. But if you are ready, it will change your life.

        So overall, the message is about failure and the drive to get up and keep going. Sometimes when you get messages about failure and you hear stories about Oprah Winfrey or Thomas Edison, they don’t really translate because they’re not relatable. My problems at 18 are not life or death, they’re not always career driven either; they’re just little daily grinds that push me down. I put myself out there constantly, and I don’t think I’ll ever stop doing that because one day you’ll be rewarded for it as long as you KNOW that you’re doing the right thing and you're going in the right direction.