I started thinking about failure this week. My first thought was I don’t have a problem with failure. I usually lose when I play games. I always have, and I am used to it. I still have fun because I think of it in terms of a social activity and not a competition. I am truly happy when my friend wins, and on the rare occasion I win, I am a pretty good sport about it. I feel like this is what everyone else is striving to achieve and I am already there. I see failure as Thomas Edison did; there are 10,000 ways not to do something, and sometimes you have to go through them all to find the right way. As I am thinking and typing this it sounds so vain, so egotistical. I need to get over myself. There must be some way that failure gets under my skin...
My academic failure is a huge looming weight on a thin wire hanging above my head. Having gone to 5 different high schools and then being asked to drop out, I made it through 4 years never writing anything longer than a poem or a paragraph. I was told that I probably had a learning disability, but they didn’t have the resources so I would have to leave. It wasn’t until I tried to go to college, that I was done in by art appreciation. The mid-term was a 7-page paper on the morality of moving a sculpture from its intended environment. I wrote a paragraph and then spent 6 hours staring at my screen, crying. I dropped out the next day, blaming my work schedule. Years later, neither my Associates in Accounting or Applied Metal Sciences ever required me to write papers longer than a page.
When I started at Marylhurst, I fell so in love with the people and the learning style that I decided it was time for me to learn to be a writer. I am already a poet and I love to read, how hard could writing really be? I have never been tested for any learning disability; I’m afraid they will tell me that there is nothing wrong with me and it is all in my head. With my “Entering Student” class, our final was a PowerPoint, and I had only a 2-page paper to write. It was a stretch but I completed it.
The next semester I took Intro to Human Studies and Research Writing the same semester. It almost broke me. It was too much and I cried a lot. Along with all the research papers, I wrote a 27-page final for my intro class. I completed that final, turned it in, and got an A in the class. That still makes me cry to think about. I have 2 semesters left in school and I still panic every single time I stare at a blank Word document or take a class that has more than one paper to write. I still have to talk myself into staying in school every single day. Last semester I had 4 classes that all require me to write up to 4 pages every week. Every day I want to quit because I cannot write. It is still in my head after all these years, I am a failure at school.
I have 2 Associates Degrees (with Honors), I have a 3.9 GPA, and am just 7 classes from graduating with my Bachelor’s Degree, but I still see myself as an academic failure. I FEEL like a failure. I came across a blog post by Seth Godin titled On Feeling Like a Failure. The post itself was short but good. There was one sentence that sums up entirely what I am doing wrong: “Stop engaging with the false theory that the best way to stop feeling like a failure is to succeed.” This is a game-changer for me.
For all intense and purposes, I have succeeded. I have been successful in school. So why does it feel like such a lie to type “I have been successful in school?” Writing a 27-page paper, that I got an A on, did not convince me that I could possibly succeed at writing anything. Both my degrees did not convince me that I could do well in school. Not failing, has not changed the feelings of failing. So how do I change this feeling?