This Is Your Life by John O'Farrell

some ancient Chinese torture for irritable insomniacs.
    Just as football matches generally start at 3 p.m. and school always began at 9 a.m., three o’clock in the morning is the long-established kick-off time for the traditional ‘where did my life go wrong?’ meditation. There is no better moment than the low-energy loneliness of the small hours to enter that innermost cavern of self-pity and regret. They ought to market special negative-thinking tapes that you could play to yourself when you wake up in the middle of the night, just in case you weren’t convinced of your own worthlessness. To the echoey background music of distant panpipes and mysterious tubular chiming, a Californian with a gentle but authoritative voice could assert, ‘You are a worthless piece of shit. You have achieved nothing. Your life is a mess and it’s all
your
fault.’ Apparently over 50 per cent of suicides happen in the small hours of the night. I’m sure with my negative-thinking-tape idea they could get that figure up another 10 per cent or so.
    As you grow older, you gradually realize that the gulf between where you are now and where you had hoped to be is never going to be bridged. In your daily life you pretend that you will catch up, make up all that lost ground and suddenly be catapulted to that elusive magical place called ‘Success’. But slowly it starts to seep through from your subconscious to the conscious: this is your fate, this is who you are,
this
is your life. I seemed to live permanently with that feeling you have when you’re lost on a car journey and you just keep on driving further and further in the wrong direction hoping there’ll be a turning or signpost somewhere up ahead.
    Maybe everyone experiences this sense of creeping disappointment. When Alexander the Great was still in his twenties he had conquered most of the known world. Did he lie awake at three in the morning thinking, ‘I dunno. I just always imagined I’d have done so much more by now . . .’ Did Michelangelo feel the Renaissance had sort of passed him by? This theory failed to cheer me up since there was no escaping the fact that, unlike these rather poorly chosen examples, I had neither conquered Persia nor painted the Sistine Chapel; most days the sum total of my achievements was walking the dog and maybe hoovering the stairs. Youth is like the mornings: if you don’t make a good start before lunch, you’re in danger of wasting the whole day. Well, I must have spent my entire twenties clearing up the breakfast things and reading the paper and then having another cup of tea and suddenly it was the lunchtime of my life and I really should have made a start on something by now.
    How did those famous people originally know in which area they should apply themselves? Does having a gift for something automatically impel you towards that outlet for your talent? Or was it just good luck that matched great people with the means to achieve their greatness? If Beethoven’s dad had sent him to martial arts classes instead of piano lessons, would young Ludwig have developed into a rather disappointing sumo wrestler? If Kasparov had been given some other game instead of a chess set, would he have eventually found his true gift or struggled to become a grand master at Buckaroo? Perhaps the thing that I was great at hadn’t been discovered yet. What did great goal-scorers do before the invention of football? It seems a bit unfair that Mary, Queen of Scots got her head chopped off for being a failed monarch; for all we know, her real talent might have been as the greatest femalegoalkeeper of her generation. If the rules of Association Football had been drawn up four hundred years earlier, she could have represented her country at the Women’s Soccer World Cup finals and become the heroine of all Scotland after stopping the ball three times in the penalty shootout that settled the 1566 final