failblog

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Failure. There are probably thousands of adages and pithy apothegms that deal with the concept. Encouraging us to be grateful for failures and the opportunities for improvement and personal growth that they provide, while distracting us from the main point: failing sucks. Whether it's rejection, failure to meet personal or professional goals or objectives, or simply letting yourself down (or even worse, someone else), coming to terms with our shortcomings is a difficult process. But ultimately beneficial… if you survive it.

All things considered, I didn’t deal with a lot of failure in my former (UCLA) life. I applied for a variety of competitive jobs and student organizations and always got what I wanted. My junior and senior years I was always running from some class to some meeting to some party to some bar and still managed to swing basically straight A´s in both of my majors and graduate with a variety of honors. I applied for Peace Corps without a doubt in my head that I would be accepted, and got sent to an idyllic locale in a beautiful country with a job that affords me amazing professional experience.

In short, I have been really, really, lucky.

The last year and a half has not been like that. And it has really knocked me down a notch or ten.

Out of the seven deadly sins, there is no question that Pride is my Achilles heel. Sure, I have my moments of gluttony and sloth (who doesn't?) but failing is the hardest thing—even if the only person noticing is me. If you want to get over issues of pride and self-importance, then Peace Corps is the thing for you. The former, normally well-put-together version of me could not have imagined the humiliation and awkwardness suffered on a daily basis. Whether it's trying to do something simple like buy tomatoes in the market and having no one understand you (or worse, telling you you don't speak Portuguese when all you had to utter was about one simple sentence), or not being able to express even simple needs and wants, or being formerly loquacious but being silenced by a language barrier, is incredibly affecting. Not to mention the other daily embarrassments afforded by this life, such as constantly dripping sweat and wearing unattractive clothing because it's the only thing that makes sense; banishing makeup and hair products and kissing young, healthy skin goodbye; being followed down the street by children who are laughing at you; to carrying your own stool sample around in your purse or discussing different types of diarrhea at dinner; to constantly being told you are getting fat (THANKS)… Peace Corps is far from glamorous. But I guess no one joins PC to learn how to be high-maintenance. You get over it. You deal. Because you have to.

I used to do everything in my life pretty darn well. Peace Corps has not been like that. I've had so many shortcomings, so much falling-short, so many disappointments. Some of them are not my fault. But many of them are. It has been a constant battle to dig through the miry clay of negative thought and fight to rediscover my own sense of self-worth and confidence. It has been hard throughout, but my psyche got dealt its greatest blow on Saturday.

Studying for the GRE was tedious at times, but through it all I thought that this was just a snobby version of the SAT. I learned this stuff in junior high. Easy-peasy.

The scarier part was the implications of said test. Can I apply to graduate school this year? To the programs I really want? Or will I be forced to wait another year, and strengthen my application? I can be prone to stress regarding the future (“Let go and let God” sounds great in my head, but usually doesn’t make it all the way into my heart) so this test WAS important. But whatever. It's just the dumb GRE—the annoying little sister of the REAL post-grad exams (LSAT, MCAT) trying to be taken seriously and failing.

The writing section came first and went well. Even though it is the section no one cares about, I was still feeling good. Right into the first verbal section, which went fine. But then the ish hit the proverbial fan.

I’d been the most worried about the math, for a variety of reasons. There were a few topics that still made me anxious (who really needs to know how to calculate the length of the altitude of a triangle inscribed in a circle inscribed in a square, for example??) and the timing. I did six practice tests from my Barron’s book and could barely finished the 28 problems in the 45 minutes allowed, but I was doing it. I can only blame myself in that I didn’t realize the book was based on the computer adaptive test and that the paper test, a privilege reserved only for those of us overseas, actually had 30 questions (more problems) in 30 minutes (significantly less time). The reality of this situation didn’t set in until I realized I was halfway through the time allotted and had completed precisely nine problems—the easiest ones. The ensuing mad rush resulted in me filling in somewhere between six and ten (out of 30!) in the last seconds, blindly guessing.

This has never happened to me before. EVER.

My brain was spinning with shock and disappointment and tears for my dreams of a 1450 and Princeton admittance began to creep in. I had to turn the page immediately and continue into the next section—but I was off my game. Staring at analogy questions where I knew all 12 of the vocab words, but my brain couldn’t string a relationship together. The self-destruction carried right into the final math section, which a very hyper-on-the-verge-of-full-out-panicking me filled out as fast as possible, on the edge of my seat, haphazardly filling in bubbles with the hopes of saving just a few more seconds. I didn’t have to guess on as many this time. But I still had to.

After it was over, I sat there in shock. Months and months of studying had come down to this? I was supposed to be feeling happy, relieved, accomplished. Instead it was taking everything in me to resist running up to the front of the room, stealing my test sheet, ripping it into small pieces while screaming “THIS IS NOT FAIR!! I WAS SUPPOSED TO ACE THIS TEST!!!” Indeed, I felt like an Olympic sprinter who had trained for twelve hours a day for years, giving up everything else, only to trip over a shoelace at the start.

I tried to hold it together but the tears, they still came. And all those things, those encouragements that I KNEW… (You haven’t even gotten your scores back. Maybe you did better than you think. Everyone thought it was hard. You can just take it again. If anything you just take another year off before school; you were thinking about it anyway…) Nothing made me feel better. It touched a deeper nerve within me.

I had failed myself.

So much of PC, I have had to deal with feeling like I failed to meet other’s expectations, for a variety of reasons. Like I had let them down. But this was the one thing that was just for me. And I failed myself.

These last few days have been a powerful lesson for me in terms of how I react to things like this. In short, as you can probably tell, I SUCK at it! But if there is one thing I know: this is not the first time I have failed, and it is FAR from the last. It may indeed be true that my life will be more defined by how I respond to failure than by my successes. I just need to learn to pick myself back up. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And I’m not dead yet.