Losing isn’t always a bad thing
I was watching a brilliant TV series recently (a Tawainese drama called Forget You Not), where the main character is considering becoming a stand-up comedian, but she doesn’t think she can do it.
“What stories do I have to tell?” she says, “I’m a drunk loser having a midlife crisis”.
To which someone responds:
“That is perfect – the losers have the best stories.”
For some reason, that resonated.
The woman in the series is 40 years old, just getting fired, and soon getting divorced – some, or all of which you might find relatable.
When, like her, we face life changes we didn’t ask for, especially involving the loss of something we valued, it’s easy to feel like failures. Even more so when it is society tells us we should be doing (like keeping a job or a marriage), or when a few of those changes hit us at the same time.
The woman in the series is also caring with her aging father who has dementia and supports her comedy career by working at a convenience store.
Her story is about loss and the hard choices we have to make in midlife (she chooses to move in with her father instead of saving her marriage). But it’s also about the deeper relationship she gains with her father, as she cares for him daily while he becomes increasingly dependent.
Things are not going her way, but the beauty of the series is that these hard times are also what makes her life colourful. She uses her divorce and her father’s dementia as a topic for her comedy shows, and little by little we see her become more at peace with herself and her choices.
As a general rule, in stories and in life when everything goes well, there isn’t that much to tell. It’s a basic storytelling rule: no one is interested in a hero that gets what they want without facing any obstacles.
Even in our own lives, when everything goes well we tend to get bored and yearn for more –the more we have, the less we appreciate it, because we just get used to the good things (see Catherine Gray’s The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary).
It’s through hardship that we learn resilience and what we’re made of.
Losing something sucks, because it forces us to change, but not always for the worse. If we face situations we never thought we could manage, we expand what we can do.
When we come out the other side we get to see life differently, literally, from an angle we hadn’t seen before.
As an added bonus, we become more compassionate with people who are having problems instead of judging them, and we eventually more at peace with ourselves, regardless of other people’s judgements.
Sometimes, something lost is something gained.
And we get to tell good stories.
