Elizabeth Day Opens Up About Heartbreak, Miscarriage & Failure | E77

(music plays) Elizabeth Day is a world-renowned podcast host. She's a best-selling author, she's a successful journalist.

I felt like a failure, but I probably wasn't. It was what I'd been told to feel. I've had countless failed relationships (laughs) and it sucks. Like, heartbreak, there is no pain like heartbreak. I now realize that I learned something very instructive from each one of those relationships and from the fact that they ended. It taught me something that I needed to know about myself. Infertility and miscarriages are not a mishap. Like, for people who experience it, it's a tragedy over which they have no control, and the idea that I was exploiting it to make a full-time career out of it was so insulting because I know how fucking painful and traumatic it is to go through.

Being vulnerable, something I think we all find it incredibly hard to do. And after hearing my guest's story today, I had tears in my eyes maybe three or four times, and that's because she is willing to be vulnerable and honest and open about her truth, her trauma, and the things she's learned from her most testing times. Elizabeth Day is a world-renowned podcast host. She's a best-selling author, she's a successful journalist, honestly. She's quite frankly one of the most wonderful, smart, lovely people I've ever had the privilege of doing this podcast with. In fact, today, one of the issues I had with this podcast was we agree on so much that it's hard to play devil's advocate with her. It was hard to challenge her views because so many of them represented mine. It felt like she was reading out of my book, and I think that's powerful because she helped me build on my ideas. And some of these ideas are controversial, for some people maybe too controversial. It is remarkable how much societal expectations can cripple your chance of happiness, and I genuinely believe that if we had more people in the world like Elizabeth, who were willing to say what she says today, then maybe that wouldn't be the case. Without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett, and this is The Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. One of the things that I wrote recently, which, um, after doing a little bit of reading about your story and your journey, really, really resonated with me, um, was this idea that- that society's expectations of how your life is supposed to be going will fuck you up.

Mm-hmm.

And when I think about, you know, you've wro- written this amazing book about- called Failosophy, about failure, I was thinking, what is... Objectively, like, what is failure? And, um, my conclusion was that failure is like a byproduct of social expectations, um, that's- and as is success. So, could you talk to me a little bit about how social expectations have made you feel like a failure?