Much like most of you, it terrifies me to think of failure. It’s almost paralyzing to think that something that you had worked so hard to attain could result in such disappointment. Were you to bring this up with a friend, family or professional, they would say that it’s going to get better- and yes it will get better. However, right now that letter, that percentage is all that you can think about. And as much as you have picked yourself up every time in the past, for some reason it’s even harder to do it every time.
With midterms finishing up, the ultimate stress may have died down but the general anxieties about academics have barely dissipated, especially with the reality of your grades starting to settle in. Sometimes you end up dancing like no one is watching, happy that you barely skimmed the dirty abyss of legitimate or personal failure as all your hard work has finally paid off. For some of us, midterms themselves are quite the struggles, but the anticipation of receiving your results are even worse.
Often times, many of us equate failure to our worth and no matter how many times we think we have overcome the negative mentality, it never fails to come back to bite us as soon as we let show the slightest visage of fear.
There are really two options from here – you can either give up and let everything collapse because that grade is everything to you. This is of course the easier option- the one associated with the least amount of pain because you don’t have to face the stress of trying to improve yourself.
The other option would be persistence. The hardest choice of them all because persistence doesn’t require you to fight against the doubt, the anxiety and the depression for just one minute. Just one hour. Just one day. It asks you to fight EVERY minute. EVERY hour. EVERY day. And that’s the hardest thing because you never know when you won’t be able to fight any longer, which begs the question – at what point is it okay to give up?
The answer- NEVER. (And here is the story to follow)
Weirdly enough I had quite an interesting turn of events where I realized that as soon as I had received a C on my essay, the following events were almost parallel to a similar situation I had undergone during my freshman year of high school. My freshman year of high school, I had entered into my first year at a new school thinking that I was on top of the world as the over-achieving chief editor of my high school yearbook. It was impossible for me to fail because I had always done so well in the past, so receiving a B- on my very first essay in English really struck a blow to me, especially since I had felt like I had been doing so well in the class through participation and other assignments. Similarly, the same thing happened my first year of college with my very first essay in Theology where I received a C for an essay I had spent 8 hours writing. Immediately, in both circumstances I had taken that grade as a representation of my intellect. How could I have messed up so badly? To any outsider this would simply be a dip, but for me it’s a ditch because I didn’t know any other failure. And for me, this failure triggered a slur of other worries and anxieties that I wouldn’t let in. It’s like some sort of irrigation leak- one pipe starts to leak and all of a sudden you have a rupture in your entire irrigation system.
To make things even weirder- the recovery process was just the same. Both professors assured me of my intellect, but they both thought I had lost track in my wording. They both even used the phrase of “passive voice” with my Theology professor even stating that she wanted a subject, a predicate and no more than one preposition. To which my response was laughter and a renewed hope that I could move forward and recover from a fall. Because sometimes you just have to fall off the same bike multiple times before realizing you need a new bike. In the same way, I realized that I needed to find a new strategy of recovering from failure rather than falling in the exact same way and falling into the exact cycle of disappointment, insecurity and self-blame.
But sometimes, you end up actually doing okay and it makes it hard to determine then that you deserve that. That you deserve the good because it’s really just a lucky draw. There can’t possibly be a justification Sometimes, you get so caught up in your failure and inability to cope in life that it either becomes to much or you just choose to give up on everything else.
In other words, these letters numbers, etc- they’re all stepping stones to discovering what we truly want in our lives.
The only thing that reminds me how great those seemingly insignificant characters can be are the people I am so grateful to have in my life. And I have no doubt that they are the reason why I continue to pick myself up every day reminding myself that humanity isn’t so bad after all. Theses letters and these numbers may represent grades, but they also spell out names and number the people in life who care about you and want the best for you.
By: Catheryn Mallari