I will tell people I am scared of many things. I don’t like the dark, I get nervous when I am left home alone, and I generally don’t watch horror movies (if I do, it’s with friends, with the lights on, and it must be followed by at least one episode of a funny television show in order to ward off nightmares later). I also worry about many things that most people don’t even think about for more than a second: Did that email sound too demanding? Can people tell that the shirt I’m wearing is secondhand? Should I have spent more time on that extra credit essay I wrote three semesters ago for a general education class that doesn’t really matter anymore?
Though it sounds as if I am easily concerned by many little things, I consider those fears to be normal. They might catch me every once in a while, but they aren’t preventing me from having fun, enjoying time with friends and family, doing well in school, and living my life. However, there is one thing that I still find absolutely terrifying: failure.
The prospect of failure has always upset me. I remember sitting at my kitchen table in third grade, struggling through extra reading homework until well past my bedtime of 8:30 p.m. I remember taking the entrance exam for my high school, concentrating to the point where my nose was almost touching the test paper – all because I knew that this test decided whether or not I got a four-year tuition scholarship.
Worst of all, I remember the four years I spent in high school, trying so hard to involve myself in the right activities and make the right grades to get into the college of my dreams. I was in dance classes for eight hours a week, on two swim teams, editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper, part of the National Honor Society, and working five afternoons a week. I took the SAT three times to get my *magical* super score that I thought was “good enough.” My senior year, I took half days at my high school in order to take four college courses, missing out on assemblies, pep rallies, and all the good times my friends were having. I sacrificed many things throughout my high school career because I justified the means to what I saw as the perfect, rewarding end: getting into my dream school, the University of Pennsylvania.
But I didn’t get in. I failed.
I had spent four years of my life focused on one goal that I failed to reach. It was crushing. I’ll be the first to admit that I cried when I saw my admissions decision. I had applied to other schools, but my heart wasn’t with those schools. My life plan had gone down the drain, and I didn’t know what I was going to do.
Eventually, I figured it out. I got a call from Bloomsburg University offering me a scholarship. It didn’t give me the same feeling that an acceptance letter from Penn would have given me, but it lifted me out of the recesses of my brain where I had been lamenting my failures. That call told me I wasn’t a complete failure anymore. I started at Bloomsburg in the fall of 2013, and I was quickly happy to call it home. I told myself that I was over the rejection letter from Penn. Unfortunately, things didn’t truly resolve that quickly. Since I received that letter, I’ve fallen into a pattern of behavior that I’ve just recently recognized and started to try to break.
I am only happy when I am successful. To me, this is when I am doing well in school, accomplishing feats in extra-curricular activities (either selfishly, like gaining an executive board position, or philanthropically, like collecting for charity with a club), and maintaining good relationships with friends. But my happiness is instantly diminished the second that one gear in my *perfect* system goes awry. An argument with a friend, a low grade on a test, a mistake in a dance class – anything can put me right back into feeling like a failure. It doesn’t matter how many successes I have under my belt at the time. Those successes cannot alter the scale because the failure, no matter how small, will always weigh heavier in my head and in my heart. I won’t be able to think of anything else. When I am lying in bed at night, trying to fall asleep, it will run through my head over and over, and eventually it will open the floodgates, and every other little mistake that I’ve made in my past 21 years of life will find its way to the forefront of my mind, delaying sleep for hours. I won’t know what to do or how to fix the gears that are out of place in my head.
Eventually, I figure it out. Sound familiar? I achieve some new goal, negating the old failure, but never erasing it. It just moves to the back of my mind, to wait with the other memories that flood back every so often. I’ve been running this system for a few years now. The downs haven’t been too terrible – my GPA dropped a bit, I’ve had arguments with friends, and I was recently stood up for a date. The ups are great, though, and they keep me happy – making it into the dance ensemble, acquiring leadership positions for a couple clubs, becoming friends with an amazing group of people, and so on. But I am exhausted by this process.
Sometimes my friends joke that I couldn’t live life without at least two meetings a day and a never-ending to-do list. But what they don’t know is that I need a schedule full constant activity to provide myself with enough personal satisfaction so that I can be effectively distracted from thoughts of when I was less-than-perfect. My busy schedule, full of opportunities for daily success, was working for me! That is, until summer vacation arrived this year, along with a significantly more lax schedule, and the arduous process of applying to graduate school.
In my field of study – speech-language pathology – applying to graduate school is a necessary step in the process to become a licensed speech pathologist. Which means I need my GPA to be as high as feasibly possible, I need my GRE scores to come back strong, and I need to write the best personal statements and letters of intent that any admissions officer has ever seen. Upon this realization of the work to come, I was mentally transported back to 12th grade and the process of applying to undergraduate programs. Transported back to applying to Penn. Transported back to what I consider the biggest failure of my life.
Now I’m the same nervous wreck as I was four years ago, but worse. The stakes are higher – no graduate school acceptance = no SLP license = no career. There are fewer schools to apply to, the programs’ acceptance rates are minuscule, and the qualifications needed for acceptance are sky high. I can’t stop thinking about how this could be the biggest academic success of my life… or the new record for biggest failure.
My parents and friends tell me that I have nothing to worry about, that I’m “guaranteed” to get acceptances from several schools. I am trying to believe them, but I’m still so worried I’ll just repeat history. So I’m planning to just continue on with my applications and essays, study for the GRE, and do my best to pretend I don’t think about graduate school every single day. I wish I could say that this story has a perfect end, but it doesn’t – at least, not yet. Eight months from now, my applications will be submitted, and the whole decision will be out of my hands. I’ll try to distract myself from negative thoughts with work, more activities, and more fun times with friends. I might have to fake it ‘til I make it, but this time, I won’t let the prospects of failure or success determine whether or not I can be happy.
