“Everyone has to fail to succeed!” “Failure is important; it makes you who you are!” “Failure makes you better at what you do.”
When something goes wrong and you fail, you oftentimes hear people saying these things to you. And what they may fail to realize, not being the perspective of failure, not feeling like it may be the end of a dream, a career, the world, is that these are the last things we need to hear. We are in pain. We are miserable. We are depressed and down and exhausted and angry at ourselves. We don’t need to be told this is good for us. That is like telling a manic depressive their dangerous manic states are good for them. It’s irresponsible, and a little bit cruel.
A lot of people like to pretend they embrace failure, that they have “learned” from it – that’s a lie. They haven’t. They are just telling you things to make you happy, or to get you to buy their book or podcast so you never fail again! or they just have never failed before.
The day after my birthday, I failed a history midterm. I did all the right things: I showed up to class everyday; I took meticulous notes; I typed and highlighted and reread my notes after every single class; I studied for the midterm. But I did terribly. I can’t tell you why: maybe it is because I am bad with memorized dates (you tell me the difference between the election of 1840 and 1844 and get back to me) or maybe I just studied the wrong things, wrote down the wrong things. Who knows? Afterwards, I went to speak with my professor and expressed my concerns about the test, to which he told me not to worry because no one ever does poorly in his classes. (To me, this indicated that he just doesn’t grade the midterms, but rather just checks to see you turned one in – this implication simply frustrated me more. I knew he did it with the term papers he assigns in his classes, but that’s just ridiculous.)
Either way, I had failed. I might not fail the class, but I failed a test and I know it. I did poorly on it. All my answers were misguided: I spoke of the wrong year or the wrong Continental Congress in every single one. I was wrong. I failed.
Yes, everyone fails a test at one point or another. It was going to happen eventually. But it doesn’t feel good: it will never feel good: this isn’t good for me, for my psyche, for my career, for my talent. It sucks. And I’ll be honest: I most likely won’t learn anything from this, because I don’t understand why I failed. I just did.
I’m getting over my failure in three ways:
- Food therapy. Yes, I’ll admit it. I’m eating my feelings. I went to the grocery store with a friend and bought three bags of candy, a loaf of bread, and a one-liter bottle of water. It was worth it.
- Lying to myself. “He just won’t grade the midterms. He basically told me he wouldn’t.” (He merely insinuated this – he might have just been trying to get rid of me.)
- Going home. I have a one week break and I will use that break to assess what I’m doing, exactly, in college. Why did I take this history class to begin with? It was supposed to be my fun class and it turned into … this.
And so, readers, I turn to you: how do you get over failure?
