Emma Dabiri - ‘We are still so obsessed with how we look’

0:00Did you know that you can hear all of the things that my guests might have failed to divulge in the main episode by joining us in our subscriber community, Failing with friends. It's where you will hear really riveting pieces of information like Olivia Atwood's dream date location or Miranda Hart's advice on performing bodily functions in front of your partner. Just follow the link in the podcast notes and we will see you there.

0:35welcome to how to fail this week it's with the brilliant emma dabury live from the board gosh energy theater dublin i hope you love it as much as we did this emphasis on our appearance is just you know, so, so, so dominant. And I bought like whatever the, however much booze you could buy, I bought, I bought like all the bottles of vodka. My life just felt like I was like in a hip hop, like music video, like it was so different to like Dublin in the 90s. Does it ever feel like you're a marketing professional just speaking into the void? But with LinkedIn ads, you can know you're reaching the right decision makers, a network of 130 million of them, in fact.

1:16You can even target buyers by job title, industry, company, seniority, skills, and did I say job title? See how you can avoid the void and reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Get started at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. Emma Dabbery is a broadcaster, historian, and best-selling author whose work delves into the complexities of identity, culture, and race through art history and current affairs. She was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and a Nigerian father. After spending her early years in Atlanta in the US, the family returned to Dublin when Daburi was five, an experience which saw her become the target of racism and informed much of her later work.

2:05Books, in many ways, were her refuge. So it's a heartening twist of fate that she's now written three culture-shifting works, Don't Touch My Hair, What White People Can Do Next, and Disobedient Bodies, which was a radical reimagining of what we consider to be beauty. Her first book was an Irish Times bestseller and inspired a conversation around race that led to change regulations in schools and in the British Army. It was later adapted into an award-winning documentary. She is a regular on TV, presenting several series for the BBC, as well as taking part in debates on Question Time and Have I Got News for You.

2:48Alongside this, she's a fellow in African Studies at London SOAS and is the mother of two boys. all I ever really dreamed of when I was younger was having two children and writing a book Dabbery recently wrote well I've got two beautiful babes and I've written three books with more on the way anything additional now is just blessings on blessings Dublin please welcome to the stage the one and only Emma Dabbery

3:26blessings upon blessings and I'm so blessed to have you here with me because you almost didn't get here Emma yeah there was um circumstances were conspiring against me but yeah tell me what the driver said when you were stuck in traffic on the way to the airport how important is it that you get to Dublin today. And I was just like, that's like the worst question. And I wanted to start really with the importance of books for you. So I mentioned in the introduction that books were your refuge. What were some of the books that you remember as a child reaching for? I read like really, really widely.

4:01I read like whatever I could, whatever I could get my hands on. And I think like the first book I read on my own was like a Victorian children's book called Five children and it yeah I think I read that when I was about six and I think that's that's what got me like obsessed with books I also read like a lot of stuff by like black authors or books with black characters and it was actually remarkable how many of them I was able to find in the 1980s in in Ireland and a lot of that I always shout out this this bookshop and my friend who's in the audience her mum actually worked there at the time but it's called books upstairs and um that had a lot of books that a lot of books by like black authors when I got older I realized it was actually quite like a radical bookshop and it had a lot of black authors Marxist authors so I think I was like exposed to a lot of the ideas that really went on to like inform my my my work and the direction that my life took in terms of what I studied but from from some of those books but that's the kind of stuff I was reading from a young age and was really fascinated by and I think that just brings it home to us the power of a great bookshop and people who really care about books running those bookshops so shout out to all of them yeah big time so much of your work deals with what we think of as beauty and unpacking that and unpacking it in various ways including the ways in which it oppresses us and we're going to talk a bit more about that but I just wonder if I could start by asking you now what beauty means to you Emma?

5:35Oh wow when I was writing Disobedient Bodies I really wanted to think about beauty just beyond something that was physical and physical visual and maybe quite superficial in ways and not to disregard the visual as immaterial but to think about how beauty could be understood as a verb. Beauty could be something that one does or how one behaves, like beauty as an action. So maybe thinking about beauty in terms of our behaviour, how we are and the things that we do. And I drew on like a concept. So my paternal, my dad is Nigerian. He's Yoruba. And I studied and taught Yoruba philosophy at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies.

6:28So I feel like I draw on ideas from that kind of tradition quite a lot. But they had this, in the kind of pre-colonial context, they had this idea of outer beauty, but also very important was this concept of inner beauty, which was actually somebody's character and their integrity. And actually without having inner beauty, which was what animated the outer beauty, outer beauty wasn't really something that was held in particularly really high esteem. So it was far more about kind of like, yeah, character and integrity. There's this idea of connectedness and integrity, which I really admire and appreciate.

7:04And you introduced me to a new word through reading your work, ocular centrism. Yes. Which makes me sound very clever. But explain to us what that means, particularly in this time of social media and and the sort of visual importance we place on those little grids on Instagram. Yeah, when I discovered the concept of ocular centricism as well, I was just like, wow, this is like, I felt kind of like mind blown. So obviously we have like lots of different senses, but in Western kind of philosophical traditions, sight became privileged as the noblest of the senses. So sight was prioritized as the kind of, as the preeminent or the most important sense.

7:49And we're kind of told that this idea that you can't judge a book by its cover, but we are going to be really, we believe that we can see something. We look at something and we believe like we can make a value judgment. We make a value judgment based on the appearance of the thing or the person or the object on how the thing looks on its appearance or the person's appearance. And I think I believed that that was something that was universal and that was just like it's just human nature and when I discovered that it's actually not human nature it's a particular way of approaching the world called ocular centricism and discovered that there have been many many other cultures and many in different places and times throughout history that actually didn't see sight as the preeminent sense so there wasn't there wasn't really a belief that you would look at something and be able to kind of make a judgment or infer the value of the thing or the person from its appearance.

8:49That would be measured in other ways that are not visible. So fascinating because you also make this excellent point that representation can only go so far. So purely because we might see ourselves represented now, I think your phrase was, well, we're not feeling any better about ourselves just through seeing. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's been such an expansion on the types of the features and the types of people who can be perceived as beautiful. You know, the boundaries of that have expanded hugely from our childhoods, even in the past 10 years. but I still feel that there's like a limitation because we are still so preoccupied and obsessed with how people look and how we look and I think the visual landscape that we inhabit the way so much of our lives and interactions are mediated through social media this emphasis on our appearance is just you know so so so dominant so while the beauty standard has been expanded or diversified the way we look is still given like far too much far too much emphasis and I think it's like it can be very it can just be very destructive and very very oppressive in many ways a final question before we get on to your failures so how do you personally cope with that because you do have a sort of Instagram presence although I know that you're careful about it how do you how do you cope you know I'm pretty I'm pretty active on there like um in terms of like protecting myself or presenting myself or I guess they're both intertwined yeah primarily protecting yourself yeah I actually I don't really scroll like that much so I feel like I'm not I try not to be bombarded with too many images of other women like I don't want to be caught up in a cycle of constant constant comparison we're just bombarded with so many images I feel like we just need to protect ourselves I read a great deal I read a lot of books and they don't have pictures yes you you post you bounce you eat a spice bag yeah exactly that's your mantra for life I interviewed Yuval Noah Harari for this podcast and he talks about going on an information diet in the same way that people are careful about what they eat or want to work at the gym he actually does that for his mind he just gives himself space from information yeah I mean he takes it to an extreme he meditates for two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening wow that's why he's a giant brain

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12:27So your first failure, Emma, is that you failed Irish in your junior leaving cert. And you put in brackets, big deal in Ireland. Okay. Yeah, tell us the story. That was for drama. So I didn't actually fail. Okay. But I did do foundation Irish, which in and of itself is a failure. I think I got a B though to be fair there's like honours and pass okay honours Irish pass Irish and then for a special small selection of us there's foundation I think probably three people in my year did foundation I just really really struggled in school I got diagnosed as being hyperactive when I was about nine I think I was eight actually nothing was done about it I just kind of continued I just had I found it very very difficult to concentrate in school I just can't really learn in that kind of environment and I particularly struggled with Irish and I think what was going on there was that first of all the way it was taught to us it was very punitive like it just it felt like you were being punished the way the way the way it was taught to us and I also associated with punishment because like you could only go to the toilet like if you could ask in Irish oh my god yeah or if you got in trouble which for me was quite frequently you'd have to you'd have to write lines I'd have to write the lines in Irish so like I associated like Irish language with punishment and then it was just like it's such an extraordinarily like fascinating and beautiful language that as an adult I have tried to like go back and learn so my relationship with the Irish language is like unrecognizable to what it was when I was a child and I think that just goes to show there was such a real failure actually in the way in the way it was in the way it was presented to us I think none of the magic that exists within it was apparent to me was made apparent to us it also just felt like a dead and useless thing that was a waste of time that's the way it was presented when I'm back in Dublin now or in Ireland like more generally and there are just so many people who are Irish and who aren't white I almost feel what my childhood was like didn't happen because it's so dramatically different to how it is today and the fact that such change has occurred over such a short period of time is like kind of mind-blowing but when I was growing up I was like very much very very much an anomaly and so there was quite like a constant like refrain that I wasn't really Irish so I was being told this all the time having to learn this language that I didn't enjoy learning that I associated with being punished that didn't feel relevant to my life when I was told that I wasn't even this thing I just felt very disconnected from it and kind of like just very resentful towards it um so you had to do it in school like it wasn't it wasn't an option yeah it was just like scraping through I just hadn't learned anything so I ended up in this kind of remedial place yeah one of the things that I feel first bonded us was the similarity, although by no means the equivalence of our childhood experience, in that you moved to Dublin when you were five and I moved to Derry when I was four.

16:09And obviously, as you can hear, I did not pick up the accent. And if you've seen Derry Girls, which I sincerely hope you have I'm like the weird English cousin James yeah and I constantly felt like that I was making excuses for living there even though it was my home and I still consider it my home and it was really amazing to speak to you about that feeling of outsidership even though it is your home yeah and I wonder if I could ask you a bit more about it from your specific perspective which is one of race because you do you wrote in don't touch my hair about some of the exchanges that you had with friends and nuns there was a nun who wanted to look at your teeth she didn't want to look at my teeth she actually pulled my lips back do you mind talking to us a bit about god i wrote that ages ago but yeah yeah yeah sure god i was also when i moved here as well i had an american accent as well so i wasn't just it wasn't just race it was also like my accent but I got a Dublin accent like pretty pretty quick yeah so a school friend of mine her great aunt had been like a nun in Nigeria she was very elderly and we went to visit her in um I think a home for elderly nuns I don't know why she brought me with her I actually don't even know why I went but um we ended up there we went in and I think like she I think the aunt was like quite senile by this stage she was very elderly she saw me and um her eyes just like lit lit up I didn't know that she knew I was Nigerian but she obviously like knew I was I was black and of of African descent she just kind of like came over and she was just like I can't even remember exactly what she said but she was saying something about you people always have beautiful teeth and she kind of pulled my lip off I was just like uh yeah what I was about 12 um so yeah I had just weird I had so many weird situations like that happened to me but the the hair the sleepover yeah so one of my friends well my former friends we're no longer friends um but this was this was a very long time ago when we were teenagers and we had like a slumber party at her house and I remember like the next morning she started screaming and like squealing and everyone was just like oh my god like what's happening what's happening and um she was just like there's pubes in my bed there's pubes in my bed and then um she like picked one up and then she was just like oh no it's just Emma's hair and everybody was laughing yeah I was like 14 and I was already like really insecure about my hair and just felt aware of my otherness so that was just was just felt really like degrading and I don't know exposing and I feel like because I was really isolated it wasn't like I had other friends that were going through anything similar I just felt like very very alienated and like very alone in those in those kind of things and they're just like two examples this stuff was like pretty like constant things like that I know that you don't like to talk about age necessarily because you Not averse to it either.

19:28But I think we're at a similar age. We're at the same age. Okay. So we grew up at a similar time. The exact same time. The exact same time. Yes. Again, that's why she's the brain. No, no, no. I appreciate your, like, trying not to, like, put me on blast, but my age is out there. It's all good. And there was also this cultural fetishisation of thinness. Oh, yeah. how did you experience that so I think much like all my friends I just wanted to be as skinny as possible that was very much the beauty standard to just be very very thin but again like in that context my body shape was like quite different and again it's weird because like now when there is so much more diversity in the world there's nothing I think that would particularly stand out about my body in that way but at that time like I didn't even really know that sometimes black women have like you know maybe like a more rounded posterior so I was just why is my arse so fat and I was like why and all my friends oh my god that thigh gap had us like in a chokehold but most of my friends like had a thigh gap but I could be like six stone I've never been six stone but I could be six stone I still wouldn't have a thigh gap because I have like a bigger bum I also have like bigger thighs like there's no gap but I just thought that was fat like I just thought that was me being like obese but it was literally you know just I guess like you know like a racialized feature like I had a different body shape than my friends and this was also before having a bigger bum had been like popularized you know like this is pre-Kardashians etc so I just felt like very self-conscious and also like weirdly sexualized like I remember we'd all kind of wear the same clothes but I remember like we'd all have these little bodycon like dresses and my friend just being like oh no you can't wear one because you look like a prostitute oh my god these friends right yeah did you feel Irish then and do you feel Irish now yeah it's so interesting I not just feel I'm so Irish especially not living in Ireland I feel like very rooted in and kind of like grounded by being Irish actually but when I was growing up here no I I didn't primarily just because I was always told that I wasn't and I wasn't really I was just like you know as soon as I can leave yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna go I'm gonna go to university like I really wanted to go to America but I know we're gonna come to that I went to I went to the UK and it was moving to London that made me have to really like confront my Irishness or just made me initially like aware of how Irish I was like I got a really really big culture shock when I moved to London there were so many things about me that I just thought were my personality or were just me and I realized in the UK that these were actually things that were very Irish like that my perspective my worldview my sense of humor so many things about me were Irish and then I was just like how do I reconcile that with feeling like I can't like that I've had to leave and always being like okay well I'm not I don't feel accepted there so I'm not going to like beg to be to be considered Irish so I had also kind of rejected Irishness and then leaving and discovering how Irish I was was a bit of like an identity crisis.

23:03So that really took me quite a few years to reconcile. You said earlier that you felt alienated and there wasn't someone that you could talk to. And I just wonder whether one of the guiding motivations for doing the work that you do, for having written the books that you've written, is to be that person for your younger self or for someone else who's going through it now. Yeah, like, you know what, I don't think I've really like conceived of it as me as a younger person but I do think for other people I don't think I realized how many people across the world had very similar experiences and not even always about race but just like some level of outsiderness you know it's actually it's actually pretty common so I feel like riding out of a place of maybe like loneliness or like outsiderness and then that giving you community or like that being the vehicle that then creates community is like something that just I'm kind of overawed by so beautifully put and that's exactly my experience of this podcast really that ability to show up as my flawed self and be accepted by this community who also have their flaws and the strength to explore that vulnerability that is an agent for such powerful change yeah absolutely absolutely let's get on to your second failure because you mentioned it briefly there so it's a failure interestingly all of your failures are academic I know which you only realized today yeah when we were running through it yeah so your second failure is failing to get a scholarship to study in America which had been your dream hadn't it and so instead you went to the UK as a plan B yeah so as someone who I imagine because of this sense of outsidership your intelligence did it become a really important factor to you for your identity and your self-worth not in terms of being like a high achiever in school like I said I really really struggled in school like I did well in like English and history because they were the only two things that I could like concentrate on and just had a kind of natural it's like if I had a natural aptitude for something I could do it but like anything else just felt like virtually virtually impossible in that in that context but I had always been an avid reader so I was quite like scholarly like kind of in an independent way but not not in terms of like academic success but I knew that I really wanted to like go to university and study something that I was like really really passionate about so what did you want to go and study so I wanted to go to a university called Spelman, which is a HBCU, which is a historically black college.

25:50And these historically black colleges were set up in America during like segregation when black people weren't able to go to universities that white Americans could go to. But there's a few of them like Spelman, Morehouse, Howard that had like grown into these really like prestigious institutions. But the idea for me then of being somewhere that was that that was a black space was really appealing after the feelings of isolation and kind of like alienation that I had that I had experienced growing up and the reason that I had been in Atlanta when I was a kid was because my so my Nigerian granddad came to Ireland to study in the 1940s he went to Trinity and then they moved back to they moved back to Nigeria but my dad had been in Ireland for a little while as a child and had like kind of very happy memories of it actually so when he came to go to university um when it was time for him to go to university he also wanted to come back to Ireland um so he came here went to UCD met my mum decided he didn't like UCD and wanted to go to HBCU so wanted to go to Morehouse which Morehouse and Spelman is like a man's college and it's actually gendered it's like a man's college and and Spelman is like the woman's one.

27:07So my dad had gone to the man's one, and then I wanted to go to the woman's one because it was kind of like in the family. So there was a lot wrapped up in this for you. Yeah. So when you failed to get the scholarship, did it really feel crushing? Yeah. I wanted to go there so badly. I had come back to Ireland, spent my childhood here and my teens, and then my parents separated. My dad, we all came back here. from America. Then my dad spent about two more years here and was just like, I'm out. He went back to Nigeria. And then we were like estranged. I didn't speak to him again until I was like maybe 16.

27:48He came back to Ireland to see us. Once I spoke, once we got back in contact, I connected with the rest of his family, lots of whom were still in Atlanta. So I started going back to Atlanta as a teenager. So like all of my friends would go like inter-railing or like around Europe or they'd go to like Berlin, they'd go to like the Berlin Love Parade. We were all like massive ravers, but I wouldn't go with them. I'd be like, oh, I'm going to go, I'm going to go to Atlanta. So I was like spending my summers in Atlanta and this was like Atlanta in the 90s. Like it was absolutely popping. My life just felt like I was like in a hip hop, like music video, like it was so different to like Dublin in the 90s.

28:22I was like literally obsessed with it. So I wanted to go to university there. Yeah. And I was like, I wanted to be like a cheerleader and like all of that like American like college campus stuff and then I didn't get in. And that sense of belonging which must have just felt so important belonging in terms of being closer to your dad but also belonging in a place that felt like your people. Yeah it was actually a weird one because like it was like I belonged from the way I looked I belonged but then as soon as I like opened my mouth or spoke or just even like culturally I was so different so I guess I did have like that kind of schism or identity thing there as well in that like culturally I was re the south particularly in the 90s like the black culture in Atlanta is like something very specific and I was a girl from Rialto very very different I remember like going over and this was like in the days where like duty free was like really exciting and I bought like whatever the however much booze you could buy I bought I bought like all the bottles of vodka this was the first time I was meeting my cousins as well and I think I turned up with like two liters of vodka it was like a Saturday and I was like oh like he's going are we going out tonight and they were just like uh no I was just like so are we gonna drink these like and they were really like they were really shocked that that that wasn't like normal behavior um there so yeah there was again like this this big culture shock and them just being like a bit you know kind of confused by me as well and it was weird because here I think the way I behaved the way I behaved like I was just culturally like you know completely Irish but then the way I looked didn't fit and there it was like the way I looked fit but the way I was there didn't so I just actually I felt kind of like uneasy there as well so when you went to the UK and that was your plan B yeah was that another level of culture shock yes I hadn't really spent that much time in England before and I didn't understand like how different English culture was to Irish culture until I was in it.

30:42And then so I went to SOAS and Ranglin African Studies and that just had like a very particular type of person as well that I had never ever encountered before, like this kind of trustafarian class of person. So just these very, very privileged white English people. I'd never heard of a gap year before, like, so everyone had just doing african studies or learning chinese something everyone was studying something to do africa or asia and most of them it was because their parents had been like diplomats in one of those countries and they'd maybe been born there or many of them had spent like a gap year in kenya and were like obsessed with africa and i was just like these people are mad like and again me with my vodka and I was just like and they'd all be drinking like herbal tea and doing like poi and playing like kind of like African thumb pianos and stuff and um I was just like not ready I wish I'd known you then I wish we'd known each other as well so what do you think this failure ended up giving you apart from an annoyance with gap year trestiferians who played African thumb pianos.

32:03You know what? I feel like if I'd gone to America, Atlanta specifically, I would have like completely like assimilated. I wanted to be American like so badly. And I feel like I would have just completely assimilated and now I'd be a Yank. Right. And I'm glad that I'm not. I'm just joking. I love America a great deal. I feel like I've retained my Irishness more because I went to England than I might have if I went to America I don't know if that makes sense I feel like London is such a multicultural and like diverse place and I actually think because of the relationship specifically between Ireland and the UK me remaining very aware well first of all becoming very aware but then after that just remaining very aware of my Irishness just had a very different flavor to I think how it would have if I'd if I'd gone to Atlanta um and also I'm just really happy with like what I studied and like the direction that my life has gone in like England has been England has been good to me like you know I think things worked out pretty well there and then I also because I'm a slightly impulsive little nutter um got engaged to this guy that I met in a mall in Atlanta

33:27after about six weeks of knowing him and I feel like if I'd moved there I would have married him and that would have been a disaster. So many questions because initially I thought you said you'd met him in a morgue which no she said a mall so it was like in a mall not a morgue but I kind to wish have you stayed in touch have you stayed in touch uh we reconnected about 10 years later and we actually met up a few years ago yeah yeah yeah but not like romantically okay catching up okay

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35:40Your final failure is that you haven't finished your PhD yet. Jesus Christ. What's your PhD in? That's a good question. It's in sociology as like the discipline. And then like specifically like the topic I was looking at was, I was looking at like the racial categories. and I was looking at the category mixed race and exploring its history and its ideological function. But I've been in the completion stage, which is the last year of the PhD. I've been in the completion stage for the last six years. I keep extending it. They keep giving me an extension, but the extension has actually run out now.

36:27If I don't submit it by October, that's it. but I've been doing it for fucking ages like most of my adult life

36:42yeah will you submit it by October do you think I actually do you know what I think I think I will yeah some version of it let's manifest it yeah please let's everyone can we to be fair in that time you have done a lot of other stuff yeah that's how I justify it like including becoming a parent for the second time you've got two sons and as someone whose work is so much about beauty the ethics of how we see each other what's it like raising two soon-to-be men? You know what, so I have a 12 year old and a five year old and they actually seem pretty untroubled by their appearance. They don't really seem, this is probably like not so surprising for the five year old, but for my 12 year old, he's pretty unconcerned with and disinterested in his appearance in a way that I think would probably not be the case if he was a girl.

37:45I mean, I don't have daughters so so so I don't know he's he also really doesn't like people commenting on his appearance I think beyond my own bias he is gorgeous

38:03but he he's very gracious when people tell him that but then he's just like I mean it's a bit tiny violin but he's a bit like um he's a bit like oh it makes me feel really uncomfortable when people like say that to me when people like kind of focus on that because I don't think that's what's that's what's important or I don't think that's what's the most interesting like thing about a person and your five-year-old is it too early to tell he's another kettle of fish so I think it's it's too early to tell but he's like way more like performative and as I was saying earlier when we came out and I was admiring these very blinging cups I was like he would love that because he loves anything that's like, you know, kind of like shiny and glam.

38:45So I think maybe he'll be more into his appearance. I'm not sure yet. Talk to me a little bit. I mean, we're talking about the fact that you failed to finish your PhD because life can be messy. Life doesn't turn out according to plan a lot of the time. But you have introduced me to the radical nature of mess. Yes. Tell us a little bit about this, because this has honestly changed the way that I've thought about failure tell us about the undercommons is basically what I'm getting at yeah oh my god when you uh messaged me the other day and you were saying that you'd been introduced to the undercommons um through kind of doing the research for this and how much he loved it I was so happy because I feel like I'm just banging on about the undercommons like all the time but it's um it can be a bit abstract and in certain ways and some of the reading material is like quite dense but I feel like it yeah it's it is it's radical in its in its in its propositions and one of the concepts I've written about a lot that I find very I'll get to mess in a second before I get to mess I'm going to talk about inclusivity and fugitivity and then I'll come to mess and will you just explain what the undercommons is because they sound like an indie band but they're not so the undercommons is kind of like the the wild beyond they actually liken it to the the world of where the wild things are in the children's storybook but it's kind of like the world that exists beyond properness and order and I feel like kind of like colonial logic and it's the place where kind of like wildness and refusal and the subversion of the colonial order are like the order of the day.

40:29And actually I will talk about mess. So it's kind of like the embracing of chaos and mess and mess being seen not as something that is negative, but actually mess as a generative space where like beauty and resistance can emerge. Yeah. Isn't that brilliant? It's so good. Yes. Let's applaud it. I mean, it's Fred Moten. Because I got to thinking about it as it pertains to failure and the fact that in a society that wants us to be perfect and often wants to sell us stuff under the illusion that we can become perfect. It actually is a radical act of honesty to fail. Yes. And to be messy and to own the flaws.

41:17so actually we're being revolutionary in owning our failures so obviously life and the world is chaotic and I sometimes think if you try and be too controlling and too kind of pre-determinate in things it can actually cut off possibility and sometimes honestly like just like I mean this manifesto or like ethos is very appealing to me because I'm like a messy disorganized person so I'm like yeah let's make this let's make this radical but I honestly feel I honestly feel for me that um some of the best things in my life have come about because something that would have been perceived as the more successful outcome didn't happen.

42:11You know? Oh, well, what an amazing note to end the first half on. In all of your beautiful, messy, intelligent glory. Thank you so much. Please give it up for the amazing Emma Dabbery!

42:31I wanted to mention our subscriber podcast, Failing With Friends, where my guest and I answer your questions and we offer advice on some of your failures too. But it's actually quite difficult, like logistically in many ways, to live as a single person. Yeah, there's this structural underpinning. Please do follow How To Fail to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts, please tell all your friends. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.