It’s February of 2021. I’m 29. The United States is almost a year into the pandemic, and I’m at the start of my second semester at Midlands Technical College.
I’m working part-time at Office Depot for a lousy eight bucks an hour. I like my work in the print department well enough—it’s not terribly difficult, and I’m good at it. Paper and ink make no demands of me that I’m not capable of meeting. The job is not the hard part. The hard part is reconciling what I’m being paid with my skill level. I know I’m capable of so much more than slinging copies.
That’s why I’m in school. I’m trying to build a better life for myself.
The failure I’m about to experience is nowhere near my first. It’s not even the one that hurts the most. But it’s still significant for what it represents. I won’t lie and say it’s the best thing that ever happened to me, but it did change my perspective on things.
I’m about to drop out of college.
*
In August of 2007, I was a sophomore in high school. I’d flunked geometry as a freshman and I’d been bumped out of the honors program for math and back to a standard class.
It was awful. The class—if it could even be called that—was disorganized and loud. The teacher—the football coach—never seemed to actually teach. It was worlds away from the honors classes I was used to, which tended to be quiet and small and have teachers that at least tried to do their job.
I hated it.
I realize I’m in the minority on this; most people would love a class where nothing was expected of them. To me, it made the sting of failing that much more painful. It was like the school itself was telling me that I wasn’t worth a second chance, so they just dumped me in a class where I couldn’t fail if I tried.
To make matters worse, Coach didn’t like me. I could never figure out why. I spent most of my time in his class with my nose buried in a book. What I do know is that he took every opportunity to put me in my place and the rest of the class was apparently in on it. I’d be minding my business, as usual, when he’d randomly shout a question at me. A hush would fall over the class. The tone of the question depended on his mood, but the content was always the same: things I knew nothing about. When I’d admit I didn’t know the answer, he’d smirk and the class would erupt into giggles.
Those moments always made me feel like my face had caught on fire. I felt stupid.
I remember thinking once that I must have deserved it. After all, if I hadn’t flunked out of geometry, I wouldn’t be in this class in the first place.
*
Sometime in September, we were summoned to an assembly in the recently constructed auditorium. I don’t have any clue what the assembly was about. All I remember is that, as a fat kid, I was squished into an uncomfortable chair between two other classmates with no respect for personal space, trying to make myself as small as possible.
To this day, I’m not entirely sure how it happened. My dad, who’d had a hand in building the auditorium, assured me that it wasn’t my fault no matter my weight. But I think I must’ve leaned forward, put too much weight on one of the hinge joints that made the chair flip up and down. Whatever I was doing, the result was devastating.
The chair broke, and I landed on the floor in a heap.
It was probably the single most awful moment of my life. An auditorium full of kids—kids who bullied me for my weight, bullied me for my glasses, bullied me because I was smart—pointing at me. Laughing at me. Me, the fat kid who broke the chair. I was beyond embarrassed; I was humiliated.
I fled from the auditorium, my ears ringing. I ran—as much as a fat kid can run, and that in itself was another layer of humiliation. I hid myself in a bathroom for what felt like hours, but was probably only minutes. Sick with shame, unwilling to return to the auditorium, I started wandering the campus, still crying. One of the ladies in the attendance office saw me and brought me inside, gave me a tissue. She even let me use their phone to call my mom. I begged her to come take me home. She and my dad rushed to the school. My mom scolded me when she arrived; by the tone in my voice, my parents assumed I’d been injured.
Not too much later, around my sixteenth birthday, I became so depressed I couldn’t get out of bed. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t.
Breaking the chair didn’t necessarily precipitate this depressive spiral; I was already well on my way there. But it was an easy excuse. Despite knowing what it meant—that I’d failed again—I refused to go back, even after I got well enough to leave my bed. I was placed on medical leave at first, and was eventually withdrawn from the school entirely.
*
2007 is on my list of failures not because of what actually happened, the cause of which wasn’t failure so much as it was bad luck and poor circumstances. I hadn’t really failed so much as I had been failed. I’d been failed by shitty kids who treated me like a freak show. By the administrators, who let that football coach keep “teaching,” who knew about the bullying and did nothing. I was failed by my parents, who were too busy with their own lives to notice their kid’s declining mental health, who scoffed at and dismissed her anxiety.
No, 2007 is still on my list because of how I reacted. I gave up. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered if I hadn't. But I'll never know because I never even tried to do anything else.
This established something of a pattern for me. For the next several years, I just… kept giving up. I dropped out of high school twice before I got my GED in 2010. Every time a job got too “hard,” I’d quit. Dating? Please. I had one bad date in 2018 and haven’t attempted the endeavor since.
So 2021 was not a new experience for me. I’d failed before. Sure, I let myself wallow in it for a while. That’s a natural human response. You fuck around, you find out, you eat your weight in Oreos and sweet and sour chicken. C’est la vie. The difference is that I didn’t give up. I went back. I tried again.
I’m not going to bullshit you with some majestic, orchestra-swelling-with-motivational-music, instantaneous epiphany. That only happens in the movies. It took a minute. After I dropped out, I took a full-time job that I ended up hating, and a part-time job that I loved. The part-time job was at Tech in the library. I've never felt more at home. I spent the rest of spring and the whole summer working at a vet clinic, hating every second of it, feeling out of place and sick with desperation. I counted down the hours until I could go back to Tech. If it hadn’t been for that job, I’m not sure if I’d have made my way back to the halls of academia.
At the library, I had a place where I could, maybe for the first time, really sit with my thoughts and feelings. And I realized that I didn’t want to be the person who just took life on the chin, one hit after the other. I didn’t want to be the person who got knocked down and didn’t get back up. I’d been that person. Hell, I still was that person. And I didn’t like her very much. I figured the only way to get somewhere different was by doing something different. And at that point, the only thing I hadn’t tried was trying again.
So I did.
I graduated from Tech in May of 2023. I didn’t have to. I knew I was transferring to USC that fall. But I needed that piece of paper. I needed to have tangible proof of what happens when you fail and try again.
*
I had a hard time writing this piece. I almost gave up on it, too. I’ve written it and rewritten it at least a dozen times. It wasn’t that putting it down on paper was difficult. It was just that writing it meant I had to reckon with my past failures. To do that, I had to tell you things I never thought I’d tell anyone, things I was too ashamed for anyone to know.
But as I wrestled with writing this, I realized that that was my problem. I’d learned my lesson, so to speak, but I was still carrying the shame that came before it. I realized that I had to let that shame go, because it wasn’t serving me. It was only holding me back.
The thing is: everyone fails. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone messes up. You are not alone, even though it might sometimes feel like you are.
Your failures say nothing about who you are as a person. Shit happens. Sometimes it’s outside of our control. Sometimes it isn’t. Doesn’t matter, because either way, the shame that you feel, that feeling of not being enough, of deserving the bad things that happen as a result—you don’t have to carry any of that with you.
And, at the risk of sounding incredibly corny: Failure is not a four-letter word. It really is all a matter of perspective. Failure isn’t necessarily failing—unless you give up.
Because it’s going to keep happening. Failure is not something you outgrow. As long as you’re alive, you’ll fail at something. But you can’t let that stop you.
For me? Failure is an opportunity. An opportunity to learn something about myself, to grow as a person. It’s not always something I’m aware of as it’s happening. Mostly I only realize in retrospect. But the lesson is still there when I’m ready to learn it.
It doesn’t necessarily feel good. I won’t lie and say that I’m happy to have failed as many times as I have, or that I’m entirely at peace with the idea that I’ll fail again in the future. What I can say is that I value the aftermath. I wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything. Every step has led me to where I am today, even the missteps.
And frankly? I’m pretty happy with how I’m turning out.
If you’re not there yet, don’t worry. You’ll get there, eventually.
