Accepting Failure

It seems that in recent times, failure has become some sort of cliche. Just Google quotes about failure and you’ll know what I’m talking about. As a kid, my worst fear was failing, and it’s still like that to this day in a way. When I was a kid, my biggest concern was getting straight As. I was known as the “smart” kid and that meant I absolutely HAD to get straight As. This drove me insane throughout middle school, but it thankfully started to die down in high school. At the time, I thought it was the result of me accepting the idea of failure and being able to convince myself that as long as I did my best, it didn’t matter what I got. This idea saved me a lot of stress in high school, but as I realize now, it just masked the problem within.

College so far has hit me like a truck, I’ll be honest. At the time of writing this, I recently got the results of a midterm, quiz and an essay that I worked really hard on.These results were not at all what I was expecting. Long story short, I failed, and I failed pretty miserably in some areas. Academically, this is my first big failure, and it has shown me that nothing has really changed since I was a kid.

The idea of doing my best and not caring what I got was thrown out the window when the result was much less than I expected. I just don’t get it, how is this supposed to be a learning experience? They say that you should be happy for failure, and all that but I’m just not. Is this something I’m supposed to be proud of? How can I learn from this, I literally just failed, I did my best and it wasn’t good enough.

Failure is hard, and it’s not pretty. I feel horrible right now, but this is the reality that millions face on a daily basis. This is what they learn from. I guess what I need to accept is not failure itself, but the fact that life isn’t going to be perfect. It’s impossible for me to be perfect. Accepting failure means that you have to be okay with not making it sometimes. And I think it all comes down to whether you keep going.

I guess that’s the important thing. A failure is a setback, a delay. One can let that setback cause them to quit, or they can get up and keep moving forward. A failure is negative, but I learned that you can’t let that negativity get to you. To make it even more cliche, an entire ocean can’t sink a boat unless the water gets inside.