Here’s the thing about being an adult; When you throw a temper tantrum for too long you’re bound to get yourself fired or failed. Failing is all part of the process and it isn’t even the hardest part. The hard part accepting failure and making sure it doesn’t happen again. In high school I had a teacher that always said “you have to try to fail this class.” Which was simply not true. It’s easy to fail at anything, which is why literally everyone has done it.
Sometimes life gets overwhelming and you make the decisions you didn’t mean to make like fail the test you thought you passed or use the credit card you thought wouldn’t decline. What I have learned thus far in my 20s is that, you need to evaluate your issues before you cry to your family. Being able to identify the problem helps you solve it a lot quicker than dwelling or trying to explain yourself. If you need a second to cry to your mom and tell her about your awful day, by all means, call that saint of a women. But when your card declines at Starbucks and you call your parents for $100 to get you through the week, you aren’t solving the issue of where the hell the $100 they sent you last week went. We are in college, we are not Beyonce. Ordering a pair of shoes and getting 4 drinks on a Thursday night is unacceptable when the money that was supposed to pay last month’s wifi was used to cover your tab.
A lot of the time, we get ourselves into trouble because we either fail to recognize the repercussions of our actions, or fail to recognize the repercussion of not taking action. It feels so good not to study for your math exam and watch Gossip Girl, for the third time instead. What doesn’t feel good is getting a 40% on your math test because Blaire and Serena didn’t contribute to your ability to solve logarithms. It’s okay to fail when you give something your all and it just doesn’t work out. It is not okay to fail when you F yourself over because you didn’t have the motivation to study for the test you’ve known about for weeks.
One of the hardest parts of being in your 20s is taking accountability for your own actions. Deflecting your problems and playing the victim when you fail is not only unproductive but it’s tacky. The next time life hits you in the face with an outcome that was less than ideal, evaluate your actions and come up with a game plan for how to fix and how to avoid it in the future. We’re grown ups and it’s time to start acting like it. No one wants to hire a person that blames the team when a job falls through, they want to hire the proactive, bad bitch that slayed the presentation because she learned from her mistakes in college.