Winning is overrated: How loss set me free

The thing I learned was that there were quite a few different DHCs inside me.

My year of abject failure is a laugh a minute, apparently.

I can't believe it. I'm a finalist in the Canon media awards for my columns. Me! I have embarrassingly entered these things every darn embarrassing year for 10 darn embarrassing years and never even got mentioned once in passing, in despatches, in the also-rans.

And the best bit is, this year I'm a finalist in the humour category.

The irony strikes "with the force of a cartoon anvil".

I spend a year writing columns about failure; the end of an affair, my existential crisis, my dog dying, looking after my sick father, dropping out of university, my father dying, my descent into depression, therapy, agony, medication, ageing, sobriety, road works, Jungian theory and the squalid misery of Kaikohe.

But my year of miserable failure is a laugh a minute, apparently. I'm glad someone else found it amusing.

Obviously, I will not win the award as the funniest columnist in New Zealand. But I shall be happy later this month to toast the winner with room temperature, no ice, Diet Coke as the other finalists are my droll colleagues Toby Manhire and Paul Thomas, so I can predict with a modest amount of certainty the Herald will take out this category.

I don't mind staying in my seat. I'm not totally sold on the advantage of winning and achieving. I have won things in the past and afterwards my life was still "flatter'n hammered s***" to use a Deadwood expression.

Winning is overrated. JK Rowling understood this. In her graduation lecture to Harvard University she talked about the fringe benefits of failure; losing focuses the mind marvellously. "I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, " Rowling says.

Like her I found loss, while buckle-at-the-knees harrowing at the time, also remarkably liberating. I was set free, because pretty much everything had gone wrong, and yet here we all still are. Alive. I had to accept I was nothing much, just a strange, other-worldly rumpty reject, but I was here nonetheless.

Rejection and letting go of grandiosity is painful and does not feel like it is any kind of progress at the time. But looking back, I almost feel grateful for what has transpired from the year of living miserably. Strangely, I now realise it is only by not trying to achieve something that you can succeed in doing so. Like the Archer's Paradox - the idea that in order to hit your target you have to aim at something slightly askew from it - you only get what you want by aiming for something else. I am very suspicious of those brisk head-girl types who write down their goals, and now I am proved right. Economist John Kay argues in his book Obliquity that the best way to achieve anything - from happiness to preventing forest fires - is the indirect way.

We rarely know enough about the intricacies of important problems to tackle them head on. I imagine Rowling did not aim to make billions, she wanted simply to write her stories. In 1959 economist Charles Lindblom described "the science of muddling through", also known as incrementalism, or "baby steps": stumbling towards you know not what.

Anything I have achieved, such as it is, has tended to be like this, a by-product of just trying to put on my big-girl panties and survive.

The poet Emily Dickinson: "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. Success in circuit lies."

So it is, that after spending a year in what felt like defeat, that in fact, I may have succeeded. I may have obiliquely achieved something profound and important.

I'm not talking about awards, or validity from external sources. The thing I learned was that there were quite a few different DHCs inside me, my crazy 16-year-old, my inner Big Daddy, my trainspotterish nerd - and others - but that was okay. I could contain them all.

All these characters, or aspects of myself, could get along and even be kind to one another, rather than harsh and castigating and bullying. Don't ask me why it is only by going through something so painful as this last year that one can discover esoteric stuff like this, but it does seem to be the way the world works.

It gives you misery which feels pointless and excruciating - and it is only way later you see it was not for nothing after all. Last year taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way.

Life is not about achieving or acquiring, or luxury possessions, or winning awards. No one will be buried with the epitaph "He maximised shareholder value." It is not even about being loved. (Latest theory: many men are intrigued by someone who is prepared to bare her soul, ie, me, in manner of examining curious dusty carved ornament from war-torn land, but ugh, wouldn't want to go there themselves. But that's okay.) Making peace with yourself can be a grisly process.

The human animal never gets what it wants; it can't. Yet "human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted" as MLK said. And hopefully that is something to make you smile, if not exactly guffaw out loud.