Failure: Fear to Fuel

Is it odd that I don’t fear failure? I grew up homeschooled and mainly taught myself using the tools of the online school I attended. There was a district head we would report to every month with our achievements but learning and testing was all practiced and maintained on our own. Maybe this is where my lack of study abilities stemmed from, but I can’t be sure. No matter when it began, I had a problem, I couldn’t focus on studying and remembering information for tests. This affected my future by putting me behind a grade, which eventually got corrected when I skipped 8^th grade and went straight into high school.

Public high school was my first ever interaction with a public learning environment. I had asked my mom if I could go to public school for my 9^th grade year to see if it could help with my learning and to improve social interaction. Secretly I thought it would be like the movie Highschool Musical or other teen movies I’d watched growing up. The drama was certainly there which I despised immensely, but the focus on learning was what I hoped it would be. I loved my teachers, and this was a huge departure from 50% if my classmates, which made me already a bit of a pariah. Not even a pariah, because I was invisible. The only time other students saw me were when I got called on, when we were in the same group, when they needed answers to anything, or if I was in their way. So, mainly I focused on learned above the social aspect of public school.

My issue with studying and focus did improve with help from teachers but a new problem arose; testing. I was a horrible tester. I would get my grades for homework and projects and pretests and those would be 90 and above. But then my test scores would be 80 and below. Unless it was an essay test, which I was excellent at, I usually left the classroom on test days feeling like I was very unintelligent and a failure. Over the next 2 years at high school, I began to develop my sense of test anxiety which fueled my study sessions the night before but somehow didn’t change very much. When it came to writing and language, I was above average, but retention of technical knowledge always showed where I lacked necessary understanding. This soon made me dislike even the thought of testing in any environment and my joys of learning turned into fears. Failure suddenly loomed over me like a judgement hammer.

So, what changed? It began with a pandemic in the year 2020. It was halfway through my junior year and suddenly we were told to go home for two weeks. Everything switched to online as quickly as the school could manage, and when two weeks turned into an undetermined number of months, I found my power. My skills as a homeschooler and the knowledge I had achieved through my 2.5 years of public-school learning suddenly gelled and a monster was born. Well, not a bad monster, more like a hungry and obsessive monster with an appetite for learning and achievement. While I had always liked to see those numbers on test scores be high, suddenly I didn’t have to work so hard to get there. I was learning with minimal help from teachers but enough interaction to supply answers when needed and there was lack of distraction and drama from other teens in class. While my classmates and friends were struggling to adjust to the new learning format I was overjoyed and thriving!

Then, in my Senior year of high school, I began to understand why failure began to plague me and not to inspire me. I had been treating those test scores like death sentences. I saw them only as the end to any career I could have because if I couldn’t recite the periodic table from memory then I was somehow doomed. While I couldn’t shake my dislike for failure and the fear around it, I began to understand it more.

Then the fear disappeared on one fateful day in January 2022. I was in my second quarter at Western Washington University and feeling like nothing was right. I hated learning, and that made me hate myself because I had always prided myself on my love of knowledge and understanding. Suddenly I was sitting in big classes with people who wanted to and had chosen to be there (at least for the most part) and the moment I had dreamed of was nothing like I had hoped. So, I decided to drop out. It was just one button and a quick popup question asking me “are you sure?” and then I was no longer a student at WWU. I asked my mom to come and get me that weekend so I could move out and then I laid in bed. I laid there for a few hours that morning, waiting for my psychology zoom meeting to begin and end. In high school I had only missed 5 days total in my four years there. This would be the very first time in my life I had chosen not to go to class. The deadline for the class came and I was hit with a wave of relief. I had failed, intentionally.

I had failed at college, like failing a level in a video game. I understood now that failure was never a death sentence or a looming dead end like I had believed. Failure was entirely in my head; I could define what it was for me and how I let it affect me and what I did next with it. Failure was a learning opportunity. I had failed at college in technical terms, (although my grades we all above c’s) but failure was no longer an evil thing, because I had learned so much about myself in the process. Failure became, for me, just another opportunity to learn and gain knowledge. Why should I fear learning if in the end I can simply retake the test, move on to the next aspect of life, and within a job it simply aids in my own development in the role. I like to imagine failing something now as if there is a popup in my head that says “check your understanding” because failing reminds me to go back and see where I am and how to get where I want. Failure is not the end of the road, just a fork or a stop on the way.

Don’t let failure be your fear, let it be your fuel!