Failure

Have you ever heard someone say that they never learned how to fail? Or, more accurately, how to accept failing at something? Well, I am one of those people. Here’s what I’ve learned in the last couple of years about coming to terms with failure.

In short: I’m still not very good at it. It takes more than a few years of therapy to turn around a lifetime’s worth of beliefs surrounding failure.

My perfectionstic standards for myself started at a very young age. I remember being in third grade and crying over a bad grade I received on a science project. At my school, third grade was the first time you got actual grades beyond S for Satisfactory and the other early learning grades. I was always good at school, what did it mean to not get a good grade?

I should say that I was never the kid that needed to get straight A’s all the time—I did have a friend who was like that, though—but as I started moving forward in my school career, C’s and D’s seemed absolutely unthinkable to me. Until, that is, I reached high school. My family is notoriously bad at math. I’m not kidding. My mom, dad, brother, and me have all had issues learning math concepts in school. My brother is the best of all of us, considering he now has a Bachelor’s in computer science.

I digress. Anyway, by the time I reached high school, teachers were just started to show us the TED Talk about growth mindset vs. fixed mindset. If you’re unfamiliar, this idea is basically that if you believe that people are born being inherently good at certain things, you have a fixed mindset. If you believe that anyone can learn any skill, it’s a growth mindset. I first watched this talk in my ninth grade Algebra I class, but at that point, it felt like it was already too late for me to change how I felt about learning. Honestly, now I believe that I could learn any skill…except math. I still hate math.

All jokes aside, I am trying to unlearn my ideas of failure. Failure is part of life, and you’ll never know if you’re good at something if you don’t try.

Stay safe and be nice to yourself!

—Abbie