Zen in the City: Accepting and Enjoying (gasp!) Your Academic Imperfection

It has happened to the best of us. 

Scenario A:We drank through 3 venti-iced lattes, stayed up all night, practically slept in butler, and still, somehow, our professor found a way to give us an exam that was nearly impossible. As frustrating as this is the day of, its even more frustrating when we can our exam back with a grade, that is not one of the first three letters of the alphabet.

Scenario B: We didn’t study for an exam. We didn’t spend time brainstorming a paper because we had tech rehearsal, an article due, and 5000 other papers due the same week, not to mention it was senior night. As frustrating as this is the day of, its even more frustrating when we get our exam back with a grade, that is not one of the first three letters of the alphabet.

Conclusion of the story? Either way, we got a “bad” grade. And subsequently take it upon ourselves to beat ourselves up for this “failure”.

Stop. Rewind. You don’t have to beat yourself up. Being imperfect, getting that “bad” grade, actually is the essense of your humanness. Fumbling a little. Making mistakes. Not always trying your very best. Congratulations. You just became even more human and more alive, you just became even more YOU. That is the accomplishment. It is also the accomplishment to learn to love yourself even when you don’t meet your standards of “good”/”perfection.  If you only were proud of yourself when you were perfect, you’d never be proud of yourself, because we’re never perfect.

In the journey of our self-acceptance, getting a bad grade is the perfect teacher. We get to practice that uncomfortable unconditional acceptance of ourselves, especially when we feel we have underperformed. It is so easy to think that just because we got a “bad” grade, we must be bad. But our worth is independent of what our professor does with his/her red pen.  Independent of what medical school we get in to, or how our parents perceive us. Our worth is how we feel about ourselves in each moment—regardless of what is happening around us. We build self-esteem by continuing to support ourselves through circumstances we think don’t deserve our support. We do it even if it feels awkward and wrong and uncomfortable, and we act our way into right thinking…we don’t think our way into right actions.

After some time, loving ourselves, complimenting ourselves, being proud of ourselves, letting ourselves off the hook, accepting and even enjoying (gasp!) our academic imperfection feels a little more natural, and a lot easier. Although it may seem so difficult at first, it’s a lot easier and less exhausting not needing to figure out when and if we qualify for our own approval. What if we just decided right now in this moment, we deserved it all the time no matter what. What kind of life would we have then?