Elizabeth Day on Perfectionism, Positive Affirmations & Rebuilding Home After Loss
2/19/20261 hr 20 min
Author and podcaster Elizabeth Day spent years chasing a vision of the ‘perfect’ home life, only to discover that reality can look very different.
She grew up in the Northern Irish countryside, in a home that was physically safe but shadowed by unrest in the wider community. Childhood fears of monsters under the bed were replaced by the reality of masked terrorists, which has made the concept of home as a place of safety so central to her life today.
In the high-pressure early years of her journalism career at T...
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First 90 secondsElizabeth Day· Guest0:00
[gentle music] The older I got, still in childhood, the less true I became to myself.
Matt Gibberd· Host0:07
Mm.
Elizabeth Day· Guest0:08
So I feel like aged four I really knew myself. [laughs] And life after that was a gradual erosion of that certainty. So much outside our front doors is chaotic and unpredictable and noisy. I really need a space where I feel that I can take off that cloak of the outside world and just be at peace in an environment. Failure is essentially what happens when your life doesn't go according to plan. So then you have to think about where you got the plan from- [laughs] ... and whether it was actually yours.
Matt Gibberd· Host0:50
[gentle music] Hello, and welcome to Homing. I'm Matt Gibbard. My guest today is the wonderful Elizabeth Day. Elizabeth is the author of 10 books and has a very successful podcast called How to Fail. As a Cambridge graduate and natural high achiever, she grew up with the idea that if you worked hard enough, things would naturally fall into place. But that isn't quite how it always turned out for her. She tells me about the breakdown of her first marriage and a frankly harrowing 12-year fertility journey that has shaped much of her adulthood. For someone who's used to striving,