divers

failure

I am crushed.

I received a bad grade on my biggest assignments so far.
Oho, you thing, that is the problem? A grade? Are they serious?

And I am answering: Yes, I am serious. Because it has such an big, ugly impact of my whole learning-experience and the past two years when I thought that I’d done good and writing about my experiences at work. Now, it turns out, I didn’t do it that great after all. And now it is on me to re-learn.

Have you done this before? Then you will know how it feels to stand in front of that mountain that portaits the work you’ll have to put into yourself to get better, to be better. To un-learn already internalized routines and schemes and to try to put every effort you can muster in the next script you are going to write.
If you’d not experienced this yourself, let me tell you: it sucks. And it hurts because you feel betrayed, mostly by your professors and educators because they didn’t tell you that you did something wrong. Or, in my case, almost everything. You feel hurt because of that betrayal and you are angry. Because you’d given so much thought in how you would constitute it, how you would write the things you experienced so that your revisers would know what you meant. Because you’d spend so much time and nerves and tears and breakdowns and temporarly failing relationships with your family in that time and now, it turns out that it wasn’t worth it.

And now, you doubt yourself. Your ability to do the job. If it is the right thing for you to do with your life when here is the proof that it doesn’t work out the way you imagined.
You doubt that you are a good fit to write in general because now you think that nobody will understand what you really meant or worse: that you are not able to portait the issue like you want to.

It is heart-wrenching. It is a disgusting feeling, this self-doubt.

But, okay. Think about it. You only think like that because you have no or low self-esteem, so don’t listen to yourself right now, don’t listen to what your head wants to tell you right now. You don’t feel good about yourself, but that is okay. That happens. And it is important that it happens, because otherwise you wouldn’t have the ability to throughtly reflect on yourself. Because even though you do not feel good, you can try to comprehend what that feeling does to you. Maybe is encourages you to prove everybody wrong, to un- and re-learn and to shove it in everyone’s face that you are capable of it in the end. Or it disarms you, discourages you for a second and you reflect why that is. Because it didn’t feel right to do that job in the first place? Because it didn’t feel good while writing? Why is that? See what I am trying to do? I am reflecting. Trying to see the bigger picture. If you weren’t hurt, you wouldn’t have the time to reflect because you would be occupied by going straight forward, not looking left nor right. But the fact that you failed lets you hold on. And that’s the time you should use to reflect on why you failed or because you thing you failed. To work out a plan to prevent yourself from it in the future. To learn from your mistakes. And then you go on. And succeed.

And that is what I am going to do. When I first realized that I’d have failed miserably, I thought that I am not good at my job, that I probably should stop writing short stories and about my thoughts about this world, but then I took the time I got from the impact of my failing and reflected. And I recognized that I am good at my job, that I just failed to put it on paper like I would have liked. And that this failing has nothing to do with my short stories nor with sharing my thoughts because this might have a much bigger impact, not on me but on other people. I could help to bring some light into the  world, to maybe guide or to contribute to a dispute in our society. But I want to help to change. And that is not done by giving it all up. I want to publish. I want people to read my thoughts, to make up their minds about it. I want to communicate about what is going unnoticed in this society.

So no. This failure will not prevent me from anything. I will learn from my mistakes, I will buckle up and keep going on. That is what I am going to do. And I hope, I can inspire you to do the same.