Failure can be rough. As half-adults, trying to work our way through college and life in general, I’m sure we all fail a lot. Failure can mean many things. Maybe you bombed your midterm or forgot about a big assignment and didn’t get it in on time. Maybe you get email after email of internship denials. You could apply for a new position at school or a local coffee shop, only to find out that they don’t think you’d be a good fit. Maybe it’s something smaller – you were supposed to go to the gym three days this week and didn’t go at all, or the date you went on last Friday didn’t go great. No matter what it is, the point is that failure is lurking around every corner and it gets the best of us from time to time.
While you probably want to forget about it immediately and move on, doing that can make it difficult to get over what you’re dealing with. When you get knocked down, let yourself feel that. You’re allowed to wallow for a bit and throw a pity party for yourself if you need to. If you need to take a night to lay in bed with your friend Ben & Jerry and bingeing your favorite show, do that. If you need to call your mom crying about something that went wrong, do that. If you need to vent to your roommates for hours about what happened, you can do that too. Find the thing that will help you get over your failure. Give yourself that time to feel bad because it could make getting back on the horse a little easier.
Then, once you take the time to feel sorry for yourself, get on with it. Just because you failed once doesn’t necessarily mean you will again. Stand up, dust yourself off, and get ready to start over again. Chances are, no one does a perfect job on their first time around and it might take you a lot of time to get what you got wrong, right. Once you’re back on your feet, now is the time to get some determination back, use what you learned from your failure, and let it fuel you to do even better than you did before. Whatever it is, you can do it. So, go out there, ace that next test, have a great next job interview, and be the kick ass person you know you are at heart.