My grades don’t matter.

Even writing that sentence makes me cringe, and if you had told me that ten years ago, eight year-old me would have gone into a tailspin. You can’t blame me, really. Growing up, grades were a very good thing. Good grades meant rewards at home and at school. They led to special programs and opportunities. All throughout elementary and middle school, I was known as the “smart kid”. It’s easy to see how quickly something can become a part of your identity, and I began to tie my self-worth and happiness to the fact that I got “good grades”.

This became a problem very quickly. I was the kid that no one liked in high school, because I would be upset over a 93 on a test, despite being ten points above the class average. To me, a 4.0 GPA was the equivalent of the Holy Grail. All of my future successes, personal and professional, could be catastrophically altered depending on what grade I got on that algebra pop quiz last week. It seems silly now, but it’s a mentality that is deeply rooted in our culture, and one that I still cannot shake completely. The problem with tying your self-worth to grades is in that moment when you do get a bad grade. Failure, I have discovered, is not a question of if, but when. And when that happened, my world was upended. I was convinced that something was wrong, that I was wrong, and that if I only worked harder- I could get good grades again and everything would be okay.

But that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes recovering from a bad grade is simply a matter of changing your study habits or finding a tutor. But sometimes those things don’t work. It’s very easy to become desperate, and push yourself far beyond healthy physical and mental limits. I don’t remember the exact day school stopped being fun for me, but I want nothing more than to be able to return to that time, when I couldn’t wait to get to class. Now, I can’t wait for them to be over. I feel like many of us have lost that excitement for school we once had, bogged down by scholarship requirements and GPA minimums.

Anyone who’s been within ten feet of me in the past year has probably heard me complain about my anatomy and physiology class. I find the subject fascinating, but the sheer volume of information combined with its complexity makes every test a bare-knuckle fight to the death- one I am struggling to win. But my grades still don’t matter.

This is not to say that scholarship, education, and the endless pursuit of knowledge is useless. Learning is a journey without end, and I live for every lightbulb moment, every second that two pieces come together perfectly and something hidden is revealed.

But I will never tie my worth to a number ever again.

If, every time I sit down at my desk and open my anatomy textbook, the only reason I am doing it is for the millisecond of satisfaction when I see that grade- I will fail. If I am only studying for that piece of paper or that line I can add to my resume, I am wasting my time.

When I study, I see the child in front of me who needs my help. I see the family with nowhere else to go; I see the chance to help someone have a better quality of life. Yes, school is incredibly stressful and frustrating. Yes, there are moments, days, weeks, when I am convinced that what I am doing is futile. There are times I get back failed tests and wonder if I’m really meant to be doing this.

But when I think about why I started, why I wanted to get an education in the first place, I have no problem getting back to my feet and getting back at it. The world needs us. It needs us to be doctors and writers and English teachers and philosophers and artists and occupational therapists. It does not need us to have a perfect GPA. It does not need us to be more focused on our grades than on the future where we will apply the information. If we focus on that, if we work towards a future that we are creating for ourselves, then the “good” grades will come. And even if they don’t, there is still hope. We just need to keep moving forward, with something other than a piece of paper to dream of.