SUCCESS

SUCCESS

This is something that, far too late in life, I am challenging. I have always shied away from questions of success, partly because I have never felt successful and possibly because I always wanted to be.

This morning I heard an actor on Desert Island Discs talk about when he was ‘sent away to school’ and how some of his fellow pupils are now captains of industry. I think he felt he went down a rebellious route, that did not fit in with the norm of his upbringing but he also mentioned a very posh house while talking about the damage that being ‘sent away’ from home does. I sort of wished I could have sat down with him and said that I also refer to the time when I too was ‘sent away’ and the terrible culture I found myself a part of when I was ‘sent away’.

I wouldn’t actually want to talk to him; not too sure why, maybe because someone like him is to me like the captains of industry are to him. At school we had drummed into us that we were the elite, that we would run the country, were almost naturally superior to other people. I never quite got that. I was mainly hoping I wouldn’t experience some of the horrific bullying other students experienced, learning how not to have feelings because that is how you survive in vicious places like that. Trying not to miss home and my parents who felt that they had given us the great gift of the education we had been sort of lacking with the constant moving we did as a family, trying not to believe that they preferred us living a few hundred miles away from them.

Despite myself I do think the culture of school and, to some extent home, gave me some of the elements which perversely made me sort of successful or at least capable of being successful. I sometimes think I am clever when in fact I am not that clever at all. I just have an accent and have had an education which means I sometimes get references that others don’t and which means people assume I know what I am talking about because I am so English and have a way of speaking that people associate with power and that thing we call success.

I don’t have heroes and I think that is telling. I worry that this is because it would mean I would have to admit that many people are much better at so many things than I am and I prefer to ignore that fact.

I have such an ambivalent attitude to success and status. It is decades since I mixed with the crowds of people who took riches and power as their birth right and even when I did I did not feel a part of their community. Sometimes in work I meet people who appear to be highly successful, businessmen, doctors and professors, directors and politicians and though I shouldn’t do I tend to fear them. I never got the qualifications people like me were meant to get, I never had a profession or training where I could say with confidence that I knew what I was talking about and I still find it difficult to walk into a restaurant where you are meant to know all about the wines on offer or into a house where the furniture stands for respectability.

When I failed at university and when I spent years on the dole and my friends like me tended to have a severe mental illness or were recovering addicts, the world I might once have been a part of became distant and faded into something I found alien and incomprehensible.

But I still had a legacy of that culture; I am not sure what it was. I think it was unhealthy but maybe over the years a degree of aloofness, a touch of arrogance and pomposity gets you to places others who didn’t experience the ‘privilege’ I did, did not.

When I was young or relatively young, I admired artists and writers and actors; these sort of people. They had never been a part of my life and that sort of culture was not part of anything I had any familiarity with. I yearned to be creative and maybe also as outgoing and confident as ‘arty’ types seemed to be but again that was a world away from me.

I am sixty; I spend half the week sleeping on a sofa bed in the kitchen, I do all my work, either from the bed or a tiny, tiny, desk that just fits my lap top on it. How I would love to have my own room and a comfy bed and maybe even an office or a place to have the vestiges of an office. I tend to think this should not be how someone ends up after forty years of working and yet I am asked to give talks on how I have made a success out of my life.

By the standards of my students from decades ago, a salary of £22 000 is not very much at all, even if I do get disability benefits on top of it, but by the standards of my peers; my fellow schizophrenics, having a job at all is something most of them stopped dreaming might happen years ago. To many of my peers, my MBE, my books, the places I have spoken, the policies I have influenced, the articles I have written are even more alien than the businessmen, lawyers, doctors, politicians or whatever my fellow students became are to me.

I do still, despite myself, wish that I could feel at ease in those places I was once expected to be a part of. I still wish I had enough money that I would know we could carry out repairs on the house or buy a new car when I finally retire. In fact I would love to feel secure enough to look forward to retiring instead of worrying about how we will manage on a reduced income.

This success thing is a mass of contradictions. I don’t really care about the houses and cars though in the back of my mind I am conscious that I will never have something I might once have expected but maybe more is that sense of inferiority. I appear articulate and speak politely, sometimes even confidently, but am not at ease in any group of people unless I have known them for years and years and they have dissolved the automatic awkwardness I have with people.

The more I think about it I do not like this word or even the value of success. It implies something to be celebrated and respected. As though you have worked and achieved and been brave and done all the things people aspire to do. I am a failure in the culture I grew up in and an oddity in the world I now inhabit, some people say I give them hope for the future of their children, or hope that their life might one day get better and almost seem to ask for the secret of my success.

I didn’t do anything, I come from a background where discrimination is rare, where people do not automatically dismiss people like me. I appear to have a very severe illness but actually it isn’t. With the people around me I can cope fine. I probably wouldn’t without them. I can work and I can do the cooking and write the books and walk the dog because I am looked after and I am not so disabled that the motivation and energy to do anything at all has disappeared from my life.

I fear success implies superiority and yet I am sure that there is no such thing, or at least not in a way to be looked on with awe. I climbed cliffs, sailed oceans, wandered in deserts not because of ability but because of accidental opportunity. I wrote books because I met people who helped me believe I could. I tried to make a difference because my companions made me feel good about it. While I love listening to Desert Island Discs I wish they would interview someone who has achieved more than I will ever do, by managing to walk out of the house despite their paranoia and voices and lack of energy and who has spent the last of their benefits on buying a friend a meal. Or maybe they could feature someone who has managed to get clean and live independently in their house despite the fact that the people who care for them say what they can and can’t do and when and where they can sit down in company, and who still manage to believe in themselves even though their record means the chance that they can get a job is pretty much zero.

Our notions of success are a distortion. I remember Wendy and Loulou last night teasing me unmercifully because I was grumpy and refused to admit I was until they made me smile despite that, as success, and success was that they bickered with each other throughout the night but there was always laughter in their voice or that a friend of James who has broken some ribs has asked him to carry his school bag between classes for him at school.

Oh! It confuses me! I think love and tenderness, and compassion and humour and gentleness and acceptance are the very basis of what I would like to aspire to. I think giving of yourself even when you are rejected again and again is wonderful. And yet in the back of me I have a website saying Graham Morgan Author and just what is that about? And if I can find it somewhere I will post some of Loulou’s art work because I am so proud of it. I think it is brilliant! I think Wendy being a director of a charity is also brilliant. I look at my brother and his career as a doctor and am as happy as I can be.

How annoying! I wish I had found a neat conclusion – I don’t like success, I don’t like the pressure to succeed. I don’t think conventional measures of success are something I find attractive but despite that and despite the fact that I don’t approve of colonialism I am proud of my MBE and when I meet a stranger and they say they have only heard good things about my work, I may look awkward but inside I am beaming and when my sister in law said of me and Wendy that I was batting way, way, above my weight I was delighted despite what it may say about my attractiveness or character!

I could tell you all about my failures but the biggest by far is that I have only seen my son twice in the last 14 years and my biggest success, that I dare to believe that Wendy does indeed love me and that wee Loulou is telling the truth when she says how much she too loves me; the realisation that I might occasionally bring pleasure to those I love; even James who has to run away if I get too close to him, but when he does, he is laughing.

(Photos: Wendy and me (and a bit of Charlotte, Otter Ferry. July, Give Racism the Red Card, June, Macrahanish Sept all 2023)