Nikita Gill - Everyone Wants to Be Heard But No One Wants to Listen

Before becoming a No. 1 New York Times bestselling author, and one of the most widely read poets on Instagram, Nikita worked as a cleaner and carer while sharing her poetry online. She moved from New Delhi to Britain in her early twenties to study for a master's degree at the University for the Creative Arts, and felt she ‘disappointed’ her parents and faced repeated rejection and misogyny in the process. In this episode, she tells Elizabeth about her unusual childhood at sea, growing up in places marked by contested borders, where bomb scares at school felt routine, and the many obstacles she faced throughout her career. She also reflects on the power of poetry to connect us, why myths still resonate today and how writing became both a form of resistance and survival. IN THIS EPISODE: 00:00 Introduction 03:10 Archivist Heart 04:33 Unheard Voices 07:10 Borders Bomb Scares 09:49 Childhood 11:30 Mythical Power 13:52 Rejection To Breakthrough 25:51 Success Highs and Lows 26:31 Rejection as Return 27:45 Dating and Being Returned 28:11 BuzzFeed Fame Backlash 33:36 Shame and Misogyny Online 34:51 Surviving Internet Pile Ons 39:16 Chronic Pain Finally Named 48:34 Family Grief and Goodbye LINKS + MENTIONS: Nikita’s new book, Styx: The River is out this Autumn: www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/Styx-The-River/Nikita-Gill/9781398537194 Join the How To Fail community: www.howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content Elizabeth’s Substack: www.theelizabethday.substack.com WANT MORE? Michael Rosen - swap.fm/l/TCjvDZaxrZsq4iZRCccm LOVE THIS EPISODE? Subscribe on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts Leave a 5⭐ review – it helps more people discover these stories Follow How To Fail & Elizabeth: Instagram: @elizabday TikTok: @howtofailpod Podcast Instagram: @howtofailpod Website: www.elizabethday.org Guest bookings for How To Fail only come from official @sonymusic.com emails Elizabeth and Nikita answer listener questions in our subscriber series: www.howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content Have a failure you’re trying to work through for Elizabeth to discuss? Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com Production & Post Production Coordinator: Eric Ryan Engineer: Matias Torres Assistant Producer: Shania Manderson Senior Producer: Hannah Talbot Executive Producer: Alex Lawless Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We're living in a very interesting time where everyone wants to be heard, but no one wants to listen. Bomb scares are not normal. They're not supposed to be, that's not supposed to be a reason you get a day off school. And it's so interesting to go from a student to a cleaner because suddenly you become invisible. It's when someone said the only reason, it's not because of her words, it's because of what she looks like, that got under my skin.

• 0:21Elizabeth Day?

  This episode of How to Fail is brought to you by Dove Whole Body Deodorant. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with me, Elizabeth Day. This is the podcast that believes failure is simply part of the journey. It is never just the destination. And if we learn from it, we can find our way to eventual success. Before we get started on this particular conversation, please do remember to like, follow and subscribe so that you never miss a single episode.

• 0:50Elizabeth Day?

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• 1:30Elizabeth Day?

  I also love the fact that you can order five oversized 12 by 12 samples for just $10 before committing. And Ernesta's design team will help with sizing completely free of charge. Visit ernestacom and order five samples for only $10 and you'll get $50 towards any rug of your choice. That's ernestacom.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Hey, everyone. This is Jonathan Van Ness from Getting Better. You know what you believe. Maybe your faith is at the center of your life. Maybe you're still figuring it out. Maybe religion just isn't your thing. Those choices are personal and in America, they should stay personal. That's why Americans United for Separation of Church and State is fighting for something that affects all of us. The freedom to live as yourself and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Because religious freedom isn't just about protecting your right to practice or not. And it surely isn't about having one forced government sanctioned religion. It's about protecting your right to say, this is what I believe, while your neighbor

• 2:37Speaker 02

  says, I believe something completely different. And honestly, that's the whole point. If that sounds like the kind of America you want, learn more at au.org/gettingbetter. Because your beliefs are yours and theirs are theirs.

• 2:53Elizabeth Day?

  Nikita Gill is a poet, playwright and artist. She was born in Belfast where her father worked for the merchant navy, later moving to New Delhi when she was six. Growing up in places with contested borders and traumatic histories with colonial oppression were formative experiences for the young Gill's creativity. Age 12, she had her first poem published in local newspapers. It was inspired by her grandfather's experiences of partition and Gill was encouraged to submit it for publication by, as she puts it, "the scariest teacher in my school." She later returned to Britain in her early twenties for a master's degree at the University

• 3:37Elizabeth Day?

  of Creative Arts, working for a number of years as a carer and cleaner before starting to publish her poems online. Since then, she has become one of the most followed poets on Instagram. Her work is infused with nature, myth and female rage, and its admirers include Alanis Morissette, Sam Smith and Khloe Kardashian. Gill has gone on to write several volumes of poetry and a novel in verse, which is currently being adapted for TV. She is also a number one New York Times bestseller and the second installment of her mythological fantasy trilogy, Sticks, The River, is out this autumn.

• 4:19Elizabeth Day?

  If you've read a Nikita Gill poem, or if, like me, you've been lucky enough to watch her perform one, you will no doubt be struck by its lyrical resonance to the human condition. "The job of the writer," Gill says, "and the job of the artist is to be archivists of the human heart." Nikita Gill, welcome to How to Fail.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for having me, Elizabeth. I am so excited to be here.

• 4:47Elizabeth Day?

  I am so excited to have you here. I often end my introductions on a quotation from a guest. There were so many quotes that I could have picked from you because your words send shivers down my spine in the best possible way.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 5:04Elizabeth Day?

  And I alighted on the one about being an archivist of the human heart because I really do think that's, that's such a potent thing to say. What have you learned about the human heart in your years of archiving it?

• 5:19Speaker 00

  I think we have such a rich history of emotion and of, of the way that we understand it. And I think the job of the artist and the job of the writer is to deepen our understanding of not just ourselves, but the world around us. And I always say that, you know, poets are very much the emotive historians of humankind. And I say that because history has a habit of being so clinical. History will do this thing, which is, you know, it'll go in numbers. One million people, for instance, in partition were displaced. It becomes, we become numbers, but the poet's job is to look at one family in that

• 6:03Speaker 00

  one million that was displaced, maybe find the littlest person in that family, the child, and then tell the story of the family through the child's eyes. For me, there are so many lessons I've learned, but the biggest one is you have to take what you do seriously when you're a writer because your job is enormous. You help people understand themselves better.

• 6:25Elizabeth Day?

  When asked where you get your inspiration for your work from, you said that you can find it anywhere. And you said this unbelievably beautiful thing, even an empty bottle of water tells the story of the person who drank it and left it there. How much do you think your work is also the archiving of absence? The silent voices, the unheard, the overlooked?

• 6:55Speaker 00

  I think all of it, right? I realized very young that there were two versions of the people that I knew at that time. Now I know there's multitudes in every human being. But when I was about six or five, I realized that there were multiple versions of my parents, for instance, who they were in front of their parents and who they were in front of us were two entirely different people sometimes. And because I learned that quite young, I also learned how to assess moods and I learned how to see underneath and the subtext with my classmates, for instance.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  I knew when I was about seven, that there were children who would come in very quiet and then suddenly as the day went on, they would open up. And I knew there were some kids who just wouldn't open up. And I knew that there were some kids who would get quieter as the day went on because they were going to head home. And, and I knew quite early that what that meant, it meant that some children came from abusive homes. And those were the people that I felt drawn to. Those were the people that I realized needed to be heard. And it doesn't really take much. You just sit with someone and they'll tell you if they feel like you don't mean them harm, you'll just listen. We're living in a very interesting time where everyone wants to be heard, but no one wants

• 8:20Speaker 00

  to listen. Listening was very important to me.

• 8:24Elizabeth Day?

  I wonder how much of that comes from the places that you grew up in. So you and I, we're discovering, have a lot in common. And one of the things that we have in common is you were born in Belfast. I spent my childhood in the north of Ireland.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 8:40Elizabeth Day?

  So I was born in England, but we moved to Derry when I was four years old. And that experience was incredibly formative for me, as I'm sure it was for you and then the move back to New Delhi. But I, I, I feel there was so much in that particular province.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:00Elizabeth Day?

  Where the most important stories were not the ones spoken about because to speak them was sometimes to put you in danger.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 9:09Elizabeth Day?

  Or to show who you were.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:12Elizabeth Day?

  And there was a fear associated with that. Could you talk to us a little bit about the idea of sort of borders and identity and partition? And how aware you were of that growing up?

• 9:21Speaker 00

  So I actually went to Kashmir before Delhi.

• 9:24Elizabeth Day?

  Okay.

• 9:25Speaker 00

  So, which is very interesting because both Belfast and Kashmir have a legacy of partition. They both have a religious conflict which deeply affects them. There is, and it's completely different from each other in regards to the kind of religious conflict, but it's there nonetheless. What does it do to the lexicon of a child? To understand what militarized presence is, to understand what a curfew is, to understand what a bomb scare is. And Kashmir had the same issue. There was this constant presence of threat. Belfast had this constant presence of threat. It was like walking a tightrope. Any second, violence could erupt.

• 10:03Elizabeth Day?

  Mm hmm.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  And you become so aware of that when you're a child. And when you do, you can't help but become empathetic because you have to be so aware of your surroundings, every room you're in, the moods your parents are in. What did the newsman say today? I remember thinking that, what did the newsman say today? And what does that mean for us as a family? You know, when we moved to Delhi, Delhi schools, when I was a teenager, quite often used to get a bomb scare called in. So I went to the British School in New Delhi. And I think at least about six or seven times over the course of those four years, there was a bomb scare called in. Now, it could have been just a kid branking, so we all got to go home early. It's nice to think of it that way. It's a lot more innocent, but what if there was?

• 10:49Speaker 00

  It was an embassy school, you know, the American and the British Embassy Schools were next door to each other. So there was this threat. And it's so, it was so normalized for me. It's only when I came here fifteen years ago and I talked to people and I heard their experiences that I realized, actually, my childhood was quite unusual in some ways, you know? And bomb scares are not normal. They're not supposed to be, that's not supposed to be a reason you get a day off school. And it just made me care so much about refugees. And it made me, especially children, child asylum seekers. It made me care so much because I realized that everything that I went through was not even slightly, even a little bit of what they go through.

• 11:33Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, God, you're just so good with words. You've expressed that so perfectly. And you've expressed also the depth in which your personal experience is political.

• 11:48Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:48Elizabeth Day?

  There is no separation between the two.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  No.

• 11:52Elizabeth Day?

  Another thing that I know was formative for you was the sea. Because of your father's job in the merchant navy. Tell me a bit about your experiences of the sea.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  Oh, beautiful. I, I loved that my parents gave me this unusual upbringing of taking me out to, my mom, who is, I sometimes think she could be a lawyer, she could talk to anyone and do anything. But she was able to convince the school that I was enrolled in when I was really young, so nursery onwards,

• 12:24Speaker 00

  that she would like to take me away for ten months of the year. And then just bring me back for a few months to do my exams, like final exams. And they were like, how are you going to do that? She's a qualified teacher. So she taught me on the ship. So my childhood was entirely out at sea. And I will never forget this. My father, bless him, is a man with a big tender heart. And because he's a man with this beautiful, big, tender heart, he felt really bad that his daughter didn't have a playground. All other children have a playground. He just got it in his head. He's like, my daughter doesn't have a playground. It's just ship everywhere. Like she has nowhere that she can run around. He built me a swing out on the deck. And I can't even tell you this, Elizabeth, what it felt like, because it is such an enormous experience.

• 13:09Speaker 00

  I remember sitting on that swing. And it was high up, like it was right outside his cabin. So I would swing and it felt like I was flying over the water. I felt like I was a bird. I really did. It was, is such a freeing, liberating experience. I must have been about nine, no, eight, something like that.

• 13:33Elizabeth Day?

  One of the things I hear a lot from listeners is how tiring it can be when your mind just doesn't settle. And I can only imagine this feels even heavier with intrusive thoughts. It's that quiet sense of being worn down by something you never asked for and never wanted, but just can't seem to switch off. If you struggle with this, I want to tell you about NOCD. Because it's a resource that genuinely helps people. NOCD provides specialized treatment for OCD. And what I appreciate about their approach is how human it feels. You're matched with a licensed therapist trained in ERP therapy. That's exposure and response prevention. And over time, you learn skills that help your OCD symptoms become manageable. So you can live more of the life you want to live.

• 14:18Elizabeth Day?

  If you're struggling with OCD or unrelenting intrusive thoughts, NOCD can help. Book a free 15 minute call to get started at learn.nocd.com/fail.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Hey, everyone. This is Jonathan Van Ness from Getting Better. You know what you believe. Maybe your faith is at the center of your life. Maybe you're still figuring it out. Maybe religion just isn't your thing. Those choices are personal, and in America, they should stay personal. That's why Americans United for Separation of Church and State is fighting for something that affects all of us. The freedom to live as yourself and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Because religious freedom isn't just about protecting your right to practice or not. And it surely isn't about having one forced government sanctioned religion. It's about protecting your right to say, this is what I believe.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  While your neighbor says, I believe something completely different. And honestly, that's the whole point. If that sounds like the kind of America you want, learn more at au.org/gettingbetter. Because your beliefs are yours and theirs are theirs.

• 15:31Elizabeth Day?

  Styx, so the latest installment of your mythological trilogy is out in autumn. It's not the first time that you have been drawn to myth.

• 15:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:41Elizabeth Day?

  What is it about these ancient stories that keeps capturing your imagination?

• 15:46Speaker 00

  It's quite interesting to me because the Titans and the Olympians basically had this 10,000 year long war. And the Titans fascinated me because, I always joke about this, the Titans get an incredibly bad rap. Like, the Olympians have excellent PR. Everyone knows who they are. They've, they've got the same PR firm as dogs do.

• 16:09Speaker 00

  When I was reading about these goddesses, I was like, oh, so there's, that all of these fascinating figures in the underworld. And the underworld is treated as its own separate realm. And as I began reading about the underworld and I started reading about Tartarus, which is the immortal prison, but is also a god, a primordial god. So a place and a god at once is so interesting, just that figure by himself. Nyx, who's the goddess of the night, is the night and the personification of the night. And then you have Styx, who is the river of the dead. So everyone who dies, according to the Greeks, has to travel that river into the underworld. So she's the mouth of the underworld. And she's the river that the gods swear their oaths by.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  So if a god breaks an oath, he has to drink her acrid waters. And is essentially, he or she is exiled then from the council of the gods because they've broken a boon. Which is why when all the Greek gods make boons, they can't take them back if it goes wrong. And I thought, wow, a goddess with that much power. What led to that? Because she's born a nymph. She's born the oldest of the oceanids, which is 3,000 sisters. And 3,000 brothers were the Potomac, the river gods. And I was like, what, how do you, as the oldest daughter of 6,000 children, how do you make a mark in this world for yourself that is that prominent?

• 17:37Speaker 00

  They're the goddesses of darker things, stranger things, like odd things. And yeah, that's fascinating.

• 17:45Elizabeth Day?

  Hmm. I can understand why you are drawn to these stories because you too are a goddess of darker things in so many ways. Let's get into your failures. And we, we were chatting before we started recording because you are one of those phenomenally generous women, and it is normally women, who has offered me more than three failures. So I've, I've had my pick. Your first failure is, as you put it, the seven years of rejections on my journey to trying to get published. Whilst I was working as a cleaner and a carer after coming to the UK, after a disastrous relationship changing fight with my parents because I was determined to be a writer.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 18:22Elizabeth Day?

  There's a lot in there, Nikita.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:25Elizabeth Day?

  Let's start with coming to the UK and that fight with your parents. What ambitions did they have for you?

• 18:35Speaker 00

  So my parents wanted me to get a good nine to five, stable paying job and get married. They were very keen that those were the two things that I did. And I think like, I must have been about 19 when they first started, you know, looking at maybe boys for me. In India, we still have, you know, our parents are so involved in that. And, you know, my parents are quite progressive in so many ways because they were like, it's, you know, they would never pressure me in that space. But they were very much traditional in the fact that this is what you're supposed to do. We've educated you. You've done really well with your education. Get a good, stable job. Like, it was still something like graphic design in their heads. They were like, we're not pressuring you to be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  You can still work in the arts. Just make sure that it's sensible, anything, you know? They want you to be financially stable. My mom was very keen. You must have your own money and you should not rely on your husband. I think maybe I did break their hearts a little bit when I said, I don't think this life is for me. I don't think I could do it. I don't think I can get married young because I don't think I've seen enough of the world yet. Something in me told me quite firmly that if I do not follow my passion of being a writer, not only am I depriving my spirit, I will end up harming who I am as a human being, as a person, if I don't follow this.

• 20:02Speaker 00

  There's a calling which is so loud that it echoes in my head every morning when I wake up and every night that I go to sleep. And so I told them and I tried to explain this to them. And, you know, I think it's such a big thing for an Indian girl to suddenly ask her parents, I want to go to the UK. I will start from scratch. You don't have to help me. I will do this all by myself. And they were so upset. They really were. We fought. It's probably the worst fight we ever had as a family, like my parents and me. And it was an ongoing fight. It was like, you know, it didn't just, it wasn't just over in one day. It was two days, three days, four days, 10 days. Finally, I did come back and it took a long time to fix that relationship. It did.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  And work from all of us collectively to fix it. I'm very lucky. I have parents who did want to do the work because it would have been so easy for them to go. You know, when I came here and I did start from scratch, I started at, you know, I was cleaning the same university, like on occasion that I studied at. And it's so interesting to go from a student to a cleaner because suddenly you become invisible. You become invisible to the same people who taught you, teachers. You become invisible to students who knew you because you are no longer in the same social strata. You're, you're now below them in their eyes. And that taught me so much about class and the way that it works in this country.

• 21:31Speaker 00

  But also, when I worked as a carer, I was, I was working with these incredible young people. I was working with young people with, with disabilities. And they were just the most incredible, funny, kind people that I had ever worked with. I felt incredibly privileged and, and very lucky to work with them because of the group of young people that they were. And I started writing my poetry and putting it online because they basically went, Auntie, you can't just write your little poetries in your book and read them to us. You've got to start putting them somewhere. So I like started putting them online because I just, you know, I tried sending them to various literary journals.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  No one wanted them. They were too, what was it? The, the word that was used for the first time and not in a polite way. These are too accessible.

• 22:26Elizabeth Day?

  So funny that that's seen as a criticism, isn't it? Surely that's what all art should be.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:33Elizabeth Day?

  It should be for everyone.

• 22:35Speaker 00

  And, and that, it really stuck with me, that first rejection that I got that said, you know, the, this feels a little bit too accessible. And to be fair to them, I'm guessing what they meant was obviously every literary journal does it differently. So maybe they, they were looking for, but it's the specific word they used, accessibility, like it was a negative, that really framed the way that I saw my work in a positive way. Because I'm like, what kind of poet do I want to be? Do I want to be a poet that's read by 10 people because I've made my work that way? Or do I want my work to be able to read someone and say, you're not alone and give them a hug?

• 23:11Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  And so it was a very conscious choice to become that person. And so every rejection I got kind of fueled me towards the woman that I was going to be. But it was so hard, Elizabeth.

• 23:25Elizabeth Day?

  What was the first poem that you took a chance on and published online? It was Tumblr then, wasn't it?

• 23:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 23:32Elizabeth Day?

  Can you remember the first one?

• 23:33Speaker 00

  I, I can't for the life of me remember the exact first one, but I remember the one that went, that started doing well. It was Perspectives. And it's just a very short poem and it's about, you know, I think I wrote it literally after a rejection, like, you know, some, it was basically about like being able to see the world and not, some people are born with this idea that like, you know, everything is, is terrible. And some people are born with this idea that everything can be made good. And I would rather be the second person, even no matter how hard it gets. And so Perspectives was like, just literally about a shift in perspective.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  You know, that moment where you, sometimes you log on and something's gone viral and we've got used to that now. But back then, I had no concept of what virality was. I woke up one day and I was like, have I logged into someone else's account? What is happening? Like, I was like, have I broken the inter, like, what is happening? Have I broken Tumblr? Like, and then I logged out and I did it about three times. And I was like, no, this is definitely my accounts. The lead singer of Fallout Boy had shared it. And I just was like, oh, when you're getting all those rejections and then after six years you experience being read, it's so discombobulating, so powerful, so amazing, but also really discombobulating.

• 24:55Speaker 00

  Cause you've repeatedly been told that you can't do this, that you're failing at this. And then suddenly after years, there's a success. What do you do with that?

• 25:06Elizabeth Day?

  We'll come on to that in a minute. I'm so interested in how you dealt with those six, seven years of rejection. Because on the one hand, you have this soul instinct that you must write. And you've risked everything for it and you've risked the relationship with your family for it. And so here you are doing it. And on the other, you have these snobbish literary gatekeepers saying, you're too accessible. This is not for us.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:36Elizabeth Day?

  What did you learn about how to manage rejection in that time?

• 25:41Speaker 00

  Do you know the hardest thing that I would say when you have consistent failures is keeping going and finding things to nourish you through consistently being made to feel that you are not good enough. And not even a question of you're not good enough, you're bad at this. Give up, you're bad at this, because that's what a rejection really feels like. And I think for me, I was, I made, I'm outgoing as a person, so I was able to make friends. You know, I had this like community of young people who were so encouraging around me, but like, it was so enormously hard. I remember thinking, God, because you question everything. So you start questioning, I'm like, did I make a mistake leaving India and saying this is my calling and I have to be here and do this?

• 26:26Speaker 00

  Were my parents right? The most troubling question of all, was my, were my parents right? And have I made a tremendous error? And you, like, there was, I think, a whole year where I went to sleep every night thinking this, you know? And going, keeping on going through that was literally day by day. Get up every morning, have this routine, go to school, come back, write anyway. Write for yourself because no one else is reading. And the void teaches you so much as a writer. Because no one is looking at it, you're doing it only for you. Which is why now, when I talk to young people about writing, I'm like, enjoy the void. Enjoy it.

• 27:11Speaker 00

  Because once you get into deadlines, there's someone waiting for it always at the other end. Whereas no one is waiting for it, which means you can do anything.

• 27:20Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:22Elizabeth Day?

  How does success feel now, having experienced that rejection? Would you, do you feel successful? Slightly strange question.

• 27:31Speaker 00

  I, I love that you asked me that because when Hikati hit the number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

• 27:38Elizabeth Day?

  Incredible achievement, can I just say?

• 27:40Speaker 00

  Thank you so much.

• 27:41Elizabeth Day?

  People don't know how hard that is. If you are not American, it is so hard to hit the number one spot on the New York Times bestseller. Let's just give you your, your laurels for that moment. Well done.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  Thank you so much. I, I think I was, it was such a surreal experience because I was in a cab heading back after having dinner with a lovely friend. And my editor emails me, because obviously different time zones. And she was like, I didn't think I was going to hit the list at all. And then she emails me and she goes, my God, you're number one. And I was like, no, stop joking with me. No way, Margaret, sort of thing. That's what I thought, but no, she sent me the, the clipping and it was after so many years. And even like in publishing, I was 10 years into publishing by then. Like this is my, what, it would have been my 10th book. After so many years and this whole idea, like, it really challenges this whole notion that there's an overnight success. You get one shot at it.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  You write your debut. If the debut doesn't do it, that's it for you. Don't buy that ever. I did it on my 10th book. I mean, there are people who do it on like their 20th book or their 30th book. And I think that moment, it was so surreal. And I did, I cried, I cried on the train back home. The lovely, I was in an Uber and the lovely Uber man was like an beautiful older gentleman. And I said, I'm sorry, it's just happened, I have no one to tell this to. Can I just tell you? And he just looks at me and he goes, what, what is it? Are you okay? Because he obviously thought something's wrong with his car.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  No, no, I've hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list. He stops the car and he looks back at me, he says, I'm so proud of you, Beta.

• 29:30Speaker 00

  And of course, I was in floods of tears then because this lovely man who I don't even know has turned around and said that to me. When I called my mom and dad then, it really felt like that moment, you know, where I remembered every fight we had about this. And my mom is like, you know, when they said they were so proud of me, I think it came right from their soul.

• 29:49Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 29:50Speaker 00

  And it meant so much. And I think it took a long time to get there, but the longer it takes to get there, the longer the journey, the more incredible the moment, because you have had so long to wait for it, that when it finally arrives, you're able to welcome it with flowers and joy and love and so much. And that's what that did to me. That, and it's interesting because navigating that success also comes with, and you know this, like, you'll have this high one day and the next day in publishing, you'll have the lowest of lows. Like, someone has written a terrible review about this book, which has hit this New York Times bestseller, but it may have had like a terrible review.

• 30:31Elizabeth Day?

  I heard this thing that you said about rejection and you were quoting another writer, kind of mentor of yours.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 30:39Elizabeth Day?

  That having things rejected is like having them returned to you.

• 30:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 30:44Elizabeth Day?

  Which I loved. Tell us a little bit about that, because I think anyone listening or watching this, who is undergoing a period of rejection, for whatever reason, whether it be professional or personal, will get so much from hearing this.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  So the incredible poet, Dean Hatta, who I'm very fortunate to call friend, Dean just won a BAFTA for his short film, Two Black Boys in Paradise. He's a wonderful person to talk to when it comes to things like this, because he consistently talks about, you know, the, the, the way that you fail as a writer and why it means more. And so he talked about how he never sees, at least now, never sees something rejected as rejected. He says it's returned, which means it has another home, or you have to work on it more, or maybe the idea needs to have a different genesis, like it needs

• 31:37Speaker 00

  to go elsewhere. And that's just not the right place for it. And I thought that was such a beautiful way to look at the concept of rejection.

• 31:45Elizabeth Day?

  It's so good and so profound. And I even think you can apply it to something like dating. I mean, I went through so much rejection when I was online dating through the apps in my late 30s. And actually, that idea of you've been returned to yourself.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:01Elizabeth Day?

  Because this person or this relationship was not the right fit.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 32:05Elizabeth Day?

  For the precious cargo that you carry.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 32:07Elizabeth Day?

  It's such a helpful way of seeing it.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  Oh, so true.

• 32:10Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  So true. Yeah.

• 32:12Elizabeth Day?

  Let's get back to your failures, because your second failure is a fallout.

• 32:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:18Elizabeth Day?

  From a BuzzFeed article that made you go viral. Now, I, now, I don't know, I think this might be a nice thing to hear, because I had no idea about this particular article or what happened.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:30Elizabeth Day?

  I have only ever known you as this spectacular poet.

• 32:34Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 32:34Elizabeth Day?

  Playwright, artist, novelist. So tell us about this article and when it appeared and what happened.

• 32:42Speaker 00

  So I think I had just got onto Instagram. And the reason I got onto Instagram was because I realized that my work was being shared on there. And there was no way for me to, people alike, cutting the credit out and stuff, which it's an odd thing to do. Like, don't you want to know where the words came from? Because I think with poetry, it is important to know the genesis of words, because I believe that art is political and therefore the, the body that creates it, it comes from anywhere.

• 33:10Elizabeth Day?

  Yes. And let's not erase the voice of the person. I mean, that's the, yes, the whole point.

• 33:16Speaker 00

  I literally joined Instagram because I thought I was going to start putting work out there. And so I was, I must have been on there for about two months, three months, maybe, or maybe a year. It was quite a short time that I'd really been starting posting my work. And BuzzFeed wrote this article about me out of the blue. And they said, like, you know, today in brown feminist awesomeness, there's this poet and we're, and they were doing lots of that. They were sharing artists at the time. They were doing lots of great work. And I gained 20,000 followers overnight out of it. I went from essentially maybe like 5,000 followers to 25,000 overnight, which is an enormous rise. But I also became

• 33:58Speaker 00

  Twitter's main character for my bad poetry. And, you know, as someone who already has all of those years of rejections behind me, and so has already got that like imposter syndrome of questioning myself and self doubt, and watching people pillory, take my work out of context, because they're all excerpts, and pillory my work and say, she's shite at this. I can't believe someone who's 28 wrote this. Why is she being allowed to do this? Like, I don't think people like this should be allowed to write poetry. And I remember this was the most disconcerting experience. At the time, I was still sharing

• 34:39Speaker 00

  photos of myself, because the feed was, it was my Instagram, only 5,000 people on there. So I was sharing like photos of myself every now and then. And someone shared a photo of me. And they basically said, people aren't following her for the poetry, they're following her because she looks like this. And it was like, it was a photo of me that I had put up, that I was at the beach in a bikini at the time. And I remember what that did to my brain, because I was like, oh, they're going to think that like, the only reason people want to follow me is because I look a certain way. And I didn't share a photo

• 35:19Speaker 00

  of myself on my feed for eight or nine years after that. It's only in the last two or three years where I suddenly I've become comfortable with it again, really. But it really, it, it's so strange, the way we perceive ourselves, because all of this other stuff people were saying about my work, it's not that I haven't already thought it myself, right? So none of it was new. It hurt. It was the first time I've been part of a pylon for writing poetry, which is a weird thing to be piled on for. They weren't even like upset about the content of the poems, because it was all about trauma and pain. There were some people who were saying that she's never experienced trauma or pain, which was painful.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  But they weren't upset about the content. They were upset that I was writing about it and that the way I was writing about it. I can work with that. It's when someone said the only reason, it's not because of her words, it's because of what she looks like, that got under my skin.

• 36:18Elizabeth Day?

  Hmm.

• 36:18Speaker 00

  Deeply. And I didn't post for a few days, because for me, I saw becoming the main character of Twitter as a massive failure, a failure on my own part. I was like, I should have done better sharing my work. I should have posted the whole poem somehow. I should have left links. Maybe this won't have happened to me then. Of course, the internet was still a new animal to me at the time. I didn't realize, and now we do know a lot better, once the internet has you in its headlights, it's like blood in the water. They're like sharks. There is nothing you could have done, once someone had decided that you were enemy number one of the day, for writing poetry. It doesn't matter. I wrote to the wonderful

• 36:59Speaker 00

  woman who wrote the article, who was another brown girl. And I said, like, how do I navigate this? I don't want you to pull down the article. I think you've done so well by me. And I really thank you. And she said, you know, this happens to people, like, there are so many. And I think she told me a few people's names that it had happened to. And I went and looked up their work and their work was beautiful. And I was like, oh, this is just a, a subjective and it'll blow over. It'll be fine. And I've gained so much out of it. Like, I know I'm only focusing on the failures of like being the main character and all these people saying terrible things, but I've gained so much out of it.

• 37:35Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  You know, I did carry that, though. Nine years of not posting myself.

• 37:40Elizabeth Day?

  That sounds to me like shame. Did you feel shame?

• 37:44Speaker 00

  Massively. I felt shame because I thought if I hadn't shared this, these like bikini photos and these like photos of myself, like, maybe, maybe I called it upon myself by doing that. Like, you know, that, that notion of you asked for it. Our relationship with like, the digital world and misogyny has changed a lot, but at the time, the internet felt a lot more democratic.

• 38:09Elizabeth Day?

  Hmm.

• 38:09Speaker 00

  So any criticism that you got didn't feel immediately like misogyny, because a lot of it was coming from women. And, you know, at the time, I didn't think that like women could be that deeply misogynistic, that they could do something like that. I've learned since.

• 38:27Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 38:28Speaker 00

  Like, if it had been a man who had said it, I think I would have rationalized it away somehow. But a woman had said it. And I was like, she must have seen something that I've done wrong.

• 38:37Elizabeth Day?

  Women still elicit so much ire online. Women of color, then there's a whole other gradient of violence directed towards them.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 38:52Elizabeth Day?

  How do you cope with that now? Because you must still experience it.

• 38:57Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So one thing I've learned about the internet, and I want everyone to hear this very clearly, because I think it'll happen to everyone at some point or the other. You will make a mistake. You will say something or do something, and it will be fully an error. You will have a legacy of not saying or doing those things. You will make a mistake, and the internet will come down hard on you. And

• 39:25Speaker 00

  What they want you to do is double down because the internet wants to create clout out of you. If you double down, they get like days, weeks of memes, of bullying you, of of just, you know, constantly yelling at you, you become like their target. If you apologize, the internet resents you even more because you're shutting that down. So you should apologize because you're taking your personhood back. And also, it is the right thing to do. If you've messed up, you apologize. But just remember, because you're apologizing, there are going to be people on there who are going to say, who are going to try and push you because they are looking for a reason to continue to hate you so that

• 40:09Speaker 00

  they can continue to make, use you for clout, right? They'll say, your apology isn't sincere enough. You can repost your apology. They'll say, be specific about the harm you caused. You'll be specific. Unlock all of the people that were abusing you. You can do that. They are looking to see where there is a line that you finally exercise a boundary and go, okay, now you are asking for too much. I've done everything you can, I can. And then they have a reason to hate you all over again and create, turn you into the main character. That is the psychology of the internet. The smartest thing you can do, and the kindest thing you can do, and the most accountable thing you can do, is put up an apology and

• 40:50Speaker 00

  try and make amends as far as you can, and then walk away. Don't carry on over there. Let people say whatever they want about you. I had a very disconcerting experience as someone who is queer and brown. Because they were looking for a reason to hate me, suddenly they were like, she's straight and white. She's definitely. So this rumor started that I was straight and white. And it was wild, the way that they just ran with it. But also, the thing that bothered me in that situation was, why did you have to erase my identities? Why did you do that? That that is an insane thing to do. And try to find identities that

• 41:32Speaker 00

  you felt more comfortable attacking. Like, why do you feel so comfortable attacking people that you're actively looking to take, to practice erasure? And then, so this is what I always say to people. Apologize because it's the right thing to do and the accountable thing to do. And then make amends and walk away.

• 41:53Elizabeth Day?

  With your specific example, though, there was nothing to apologize for. So presumably, you didn't apologize for

• 42:01Speaker 00

  My poetry.

• 42:02Elizabeth Day?

  To continue to write your poetry.

• 42:04Speaker 00

  No, I've made mistakes. I've been on the internet for 15 years. Like, sometimes I failed in language. Sometimes I've not communicated an idea properly. I have apologized.

• 42:13Elizabeth Day?

  You said at the top of this failure that although it was deeply challenging and difficult to go through, it ended up giving you so much. What did it give you?

• 42:23Speaker 00

  Community.

• 42:24Elizabeth Day?

  Other than this wisdom. Okay, it gave you community.

• 42:26Speaker 00

  So it's 20,000 people who followed me. That community that I gained out of that, there were so many young women, so many older women. And, you know, there were women in their 60s that followed me. And they, this community of women grew around me. Amazing women. Women who are doing incredible things, were nurses and doctors. Some of them were therapists. And they were like, we're using your work to talk to our patients. Like, the work just began to go out into these communities of women. They were people who used them and as mindfulness exercises, the poems, like, they felt seen. And it was all women. And they uplifted me so much. And they gave me so much in those moments. And I was like,

• 43:07Speaker 00

  I'm so lucky that BuzzFeed article was written because I would not have met so many incredible women.

• 43:13Elizabeth Day?

  This episode is brought to you by the RSPCA. I know a number of people who've adopted their pet from the RSPCA with huge success. So I am personally a big advocate. Also, producer Hannah actually fostered kittens for the charity called Belinda and Millie. So we're very much aligned with what the RSPCA is trying to do here at How to Fail. We know that animals have rich emotional lives, just like we do. My cat Huxsey is a prime example of a cat with a lot of empathy and wisdom, for example. And animals deserve the same kindness and respect. Every kind of animal matters. Pets, wild or farmed animals.

• 43:58Elizabeth Day?

  Together, we can create a better world for them. Show your love for every kind and find out more and see what action you could take to help animals. Check out rspca.org.uk. There are so many things I wish I'd known when I started this podcast and my production company, Daylight. Like, why am I spending hours trying to make a website look good? Why am I designing everything from scratch? And why am I spending all my time just doing admin? What I really needed was one place that could do all of this for me. Enter Shopify. Shopify has beautiful, ready-made templates that make your website look polished without needing to become a graphic designer overnight. Its AI tools can help you get your site up

• 44:42Elizabeth Day?

  and running quickly. And Shopify Checkout makes it really easy for customers to actually go from, ooh, I like that, to, yes, I'll have one. If Shopify had existed when I started out, I could have saved myself a lot of time, stress, and some rogue design choices. If you're ready to hear the (bell dings) of your first sale today, head over to Shopify.co.uk/fail to start your free trial today. That's right, start your free trial at Shopify.co.uk/fail.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Hey, everyone, this is Jonathan Van Ness from Getting Better. You know what you believe. Maybe your faith is at the center of your life. Maybe you're still figuring it out. Maybe religion just isn't your thing. Those choices are personal. And in America, they should stay personal. That's why Americans United for Separation of Church and State is fighting for something that affects all of us. The freedom to live as yourself and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Because religious freedom isn't just about protecting your right to practice or not. And it surely isn't about having one forced government sanctioned religion. It's about protecting your right to say,

• 45:56Speaker 02

  this is what I believe, while your neighbor says, I believe something completely different. And honestly, that's the whole point. If that sounds like the kind of America you want, learn more at au.org/gettingbetter. Because your beliefs are yours, and theirs are theirs.

• 46:14Elizabeth Day?

  Talking of womanhood and the great gifts that it gives us, but also the erasure that happens when we try to talk about things that we experience, brings us on to your final failure, which is, as you put it, years of gaslighting myself about my body and pretending I was absolutely fine because everyone else said so.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 46:35Elizabeth Day?

  Talk to us about this, because you did actually make a health discovery.

• 46:40Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 46:41Elizabeth Day?

  But for many years, you were living with chronic pain.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  Yes. Yes. So I had two separate issues where I came up against a wall for decades. The first one was my scoliosis. So I have a curve in my spine, which in the winters was brutal. Like, I felt like I was, you know, 95 years old and I could not get out of bed because the pain was so bad. And so many doctors kept telling me it was my posture. You're just, you're just sitting, you're sitting like this, and that's why there's pain all the way down your back. Until finally, I went to a doctor and they did like a scan. And it's not, it wasn't very visible then. It's more visible now. But they were like, oh, my God, you've got a curve in your spine. Like, there's a name for that. It's called

• 47:28Speaker 00

  scoliosis. And just something that has caused you pain being named. And I just was like, oh, my God, like, so it wasn't my posture. It wasn't me doing something to cause this pain for myself. I actively have a problem inside my body that I can't fix. And then they gave me all these amazing exercises, like cat cow pose and everything. It just really helped. But the second thing that I really struggled with was polycystic ovaries. And the way that it was discovered was because I used to get these really painful cystic acne pimples all over my face. They never come to a head. They just sit under your skin and they cause you so much pain. And I went to a dermatologist and, you know,

• 48:10Speaker 00

  they prescribed me some creams and they were like, you know, retinoids and this, that, and the other should help. None of it helped. And then, so finally, my dermatologist said, I want you to go and get yourself tested for both polycystic and endometriosis. Because sometimes for polycystic, they say that you put on weight. Sometimes you don't have to put on weight and you can have all of the symptoms. And I was so lucky that this one dermatologist who's probably seen it before went, go and get yourself tested, got myself tested. And yeah, I have polycystic ovaries and it, you know, major fertility issues with polycystic ovaries. One in three women suffers with this, but it takes 10 years of presenting with symptoms before you get diagnosed.

• 48:54Speaker 00

  The pimples weren't because I wasn't eating properly. They were not because I had done something to my skin. They were not, you know, all of the problems I was having with my body. It wasn't because I had bad posture. What do young girls do when we, when we can't control the outer world around us? We try to control our bodies as much as we can. And this is how we end up with eating disorders. That, that's so many of the young women that I know, including myself, went through it as teenagers.

• 49:25Elizabeth Day?

  Well, again, I relate to so much of what you're saying. As you know, because we bonded over this, I also have a long fertility journey.

• 49:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 49:34Elizabeth Day?

  And I think you've identified something so crucial there, which is that as women, I mean, many women, let's not say all women.

• 49:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:41Elizabeth Day?

  But we are so conditioned often by social strictures to internalize bodily failure as our own to carry.

• 49:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:51Elizabeth Day?

  And as you rightly say, then we seek to control it. And if we are alpha type people, we're used to working hard, putting in the effort and getting the results. And then suddenly you're confronted with something that isn't responding to this strategy. And on top of that, my experience of the medical system is that it encourages women to internalize that failure. That so often the medical language for women is the language of failure. So when it comes to fertility, I've spoken about this before, but very often I was told I was failing to respond to IVF drugs. A friend of mine was told she had an incompetent cervix, you know, inhospitable womb.

• 50:35Elizabeth Day?

  These are, these are phrases that luckily now are changing. But definitely at the time, you felt that you were bearing the brunt of that. How much was that your experience that you were being told that you were wrong in some way?

• 50:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is like, there's something wrong with your womb. Right? Like, that's literally the language around it. There's something wrong with your womb, AKA you are doing something wrong that is causing it. And I, like, I remember like feeling, even with polycystic ovaries, like it's been diagnosed now and everything. I remember that feeling, I must have done something to have caused my ovaries to be polycystic.

• 51:16Elizabeth Day?

  Interesting. I'm so sorry you felt that.

• 51:18Speaker 00

  But so many of us do, I think. You know, I think because again, I come from a culture where I remember watching, divorce was not common when I was growing up. And I think a couple of my mom's friends, some of the most incredible women you will ever meet, like just absolute badasses, right? And were in like relationships with maybe not the kindest of people, went through a divorce, only a couple of them. The amount of people, despite all of everyone knowing that that person that they were with was the one in the wrong. Still, they got blamed for it. Still, they were told like, there's something wrong with you because why couldn't you just make it work?

• 52:01Speaker 00

  And so culturally, I kind of come from a space where women are blamed. Women are blamed even when there's glaringly, when it's glaringly obvious that it's not their fault. So for me, I felt like, for a long time, I thought maybe it was because I had an ED, I ended up with polycystic ovaries. I was like, maybe that was it. Like I punished my body so severely for not performing and like, you know, and controlled it to the degree that I ended up with this, like something to do with nutrition surely. And it's so weird how, once an idea like that gets into your head, it doesn't go away. It's like with an ED, it doesn't ever fully go away. Like, there's always something that could trigger it.

• 52:44Speaker 00

  I'll never forget, I was really young the first time they kind of sort of suspected it, but it was shut down quite quickly because just the idea for my parents that their daughter might not be able to have a child was so difficult for them to bear. I must have been about 14, I was having really painful periods. That's something that I go through, such painful periods. And so my mom took me to the doctor. And so the doctor was like, she may have fertility issues because there wasn't a word for it quite then. And I came home and my mom tells my dad, and the first thing he says is, why my kid?

• 53:23Speaker 00

  And I was 14 years old and I remember thinking, why anyone's kid? Right? But also imagine how it feels to be a child and hearing that.

• 53:34Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 53:35Speaker 00

  Because then you feel like, I did this, I must have done something to make him feel like that. And he didn't mean it that way, but that's how I perceived it. He was just sad, as any father would be when they're, you know, confronted with difficult news. But I perceived it as, no, I, I did something wrong because look at what I've done to him by being this way.

• 54:00Elizabeth Day?

  What is your relationship with the idea of children now?

• 54:07Speaker 00

  You know, it's very funny, I've got lots of children in community around me because all of my friends have children. And children I've looked after, I've taken to school and, and, you know, made food for and stuff. I've got nieces and I've got a godson, guide son, as, because they're not religious. So like they, they, a guide son, as they say. And I just love kids. I think they're fantastic. I think they have these bright, open eyes and they look at the world like there's so much hope in it. And what better thing to be a poet of, or an auntie poet of, of these beautiful, bright eyed children? My, my fiance and I, we've talked about it recently and we are like kind of moving into that space of thinking, yeah, that's,

• 54:48Speaker 00

  we should, we should maybe consider, because we can give a child a lot. But then also my consistent worry is the world around us and climate change. And what kind of world am I bringing my child into? And will my child have like a full natural life? So these are big things. So even if I was, and I, you know, my, my fiance, lovely gentleman, he says that you'd make a fantastic mother. He'd make a great dad, but do we want, what kind, do we want to bring a child into a world that we know? So these are big questions. I think every parent has to ask themselves this question before they bring little people into this world because they're a huge responsibility.

• 55:32Elizabeth Day?

  And we've spoken quite a bit in this conversation about your parents and the ups and downs and the depths of your relationship with them. Where are you now as a daughter?

• 55:47Speaker 00

  You know, I've watched my, both my parents over the last four years go through something, which has just left me in awe of them. In the last four years, I've lost a grandparent a year.

• 55:59Speaker 00

  Thank you. It's been, I'd lost my grandmother two weeks ago, so it's been.

• 56:02Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, Nikita, I'm so sorry.

• 56:04Speaker 00

  Thank you. She was the, she was my heart and I'm very lucky to have been her granddaughter. I lost my grandfather, her husband, a year ago, and he was my radical elder. He gave me all my good history and my good politics and he's a strong Kashmiri man with a very big, tender heart. I will miss them forever. But my parents have just been the most incredible people because they navigated not just death, but palliative care. How incredible and how brave and how strong they are to have done all of these things for their parents and have. It's not easy to watch a parent go.

• 56:48Speaker 00

  And all of my grandparents, they lived in the, to their nineties and they suffered in the end. And it's not easy to watch a parent suffer. Someone who is, both of my grandfathers were in the army, they were these massive figures in our lives, but especially my parents' lives. I think watching your parents go through that and become the elders in the family entirely shifts your perspective on them. And it teaches you that now you are the ones that have to look after. Because eventually you will become those elders. That transition teaches you so much. And I am so in awe, especially of my mother, the grace with which she has, you know, held people through her parents' death.

• 57:32Speaker 00

  My brother and me, her mother when her husband died, like, what a woman.

• 57:38Elizabeth Day?

  I can use those same words about you, Nikita Gil. What grace, what strength, what poetry. Thank you so much for the work that you give us and thank you for the woman that you are.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  Thank you so much, Elizabeth. Same, because you are incredible. I'm so privileged to be here.

• 57:58Elizabeth Day?

  Thank you so much for listening and watching. This episode has been brought to you by Dove Whole Body Deodorant. Please do follow How to Fail to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please tell all your friends. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.