My Fear of Failure
Since I was very young and like many of my classmates, I’ve subconsciously learned to tie my grades to my self-worth. These grades are who I am. Every accomplishment I’ve ever made is who I am. Because if you stripped me past my grades and accomplishments, what would I have to show to all of my Asian parents, relatives, and community?
I believed I would be nothing.
Born from this belief, was my anxiety to fail. I could not possibly fail at any cost. I was so scared of failing. I couldn’t look at a grade that was a C or below without my heart sinking and tears shedding. No one said anything about it, but I felt it. I felt their eyes on me, I felt this claustrophobic pressure closing in.
Then I entered high school. The transition to my new life was harder than ever. In attempt to achieve more, like I was always told to do, I took advanced classes and a new sport. With difficulty adapting, a new motto I ended up adapting was “I will finish my work no matter how long it takes, how tired I am, how depressed I am, or how late it is.” And this is what I told myself every night for most of my Freshman year. So filled with the adrenaline of stress and anxiety, I was surprisingly able to live with that mindset for months. I was willing to sell my soul to the devil just so I would not fail. Getting bad grades despite all of my efforts was undoubtedly devastating to me. But that was what it cost me just to feel a sense of normalcy.
I’m not going to say it wasn’t hard either, because it was. Every night I stayed up while tired, I just wanted to cry and I wanted to be done with it. Sometimes I did cry. But I was fine with it of course because I believed it was worth it.
My Sophomore year got better luckily. But it didn’t stay better for long.
At the start of my Junior year, I promised myself that I would have a better mindset about school. I tried my best to tell myself that if I didn’t know something, it was okay. I would practice trying to learn it. I promised myself I would take better care of myself than I did in the nightmare of a year I did Freshman year.
Yet there was one miscalculation I made: What if I didn’t learn the concept in time? What would I do? Would I just fail? These were the questions I failed to think about, and the tears I shed nearly every night were proof of that. The way I practiced till I was physically unable to practice anymore was proof of that. The way I called my friend afterward saying that I would take care of myself only to wake up at 4:30 am the next day to practice to proof of that. The way I burnt out and quit my sport later that day was proof of that.
I learned from that specific moment in my life that there was only so much I could put up with before I reached my breaking point.
Well, that was just my sport, right? How was I doing in school? To answer that question in a sentence: Collectively, I got so many Ds and Fs on my tests that it didn’t faze me anymore. I’ve gotten more Ds and Fs this year than I have in all of my previous years combined. Sure, my overall grades were doing okay because of all of the other grades and points that were in there, but I wasn’t doing okay. I wanted to know what I was doing wrong because I was trying so hard, and if you asked any of my teachers and friends who know me well too, they would say the same.
I felt like a failure. I felt like I was nothing.
Like many things though, it did get better. A student editorial that I read called “Lessons From Failure” from Sophie S. Ding really resonated with me on this note. “The short-term gains of A+ report cards come at the long-term cost of sense of self. When failure is foreign to kids, what will they do in the real world where frustration and lost opportunities are commonplace?” was a quote that especially stuck with me because it was a gentle reminder that preventing myself from failing stunted my growth. Her essay was a testament to how it was okay to fail, something that I’ve been going against my whole life.
I’m not just my grades and accomplishments. I’m my failures too, along with every lesson I learned from my failures.
