We have all failed at something in our lives. A sport sometimes just does not come naturally to us, we just can't get the hang of speaking Chinese, no matter what you do you cannot walk in high heels. You will fail. Over and over again. Sometimes if you work hard enough at something you will get it down, but there is always a time you will fail. Without that failure you do not appreciate your success as much, and you do not appreciate the hard work that got you to success.
Failing In School
I have always been a pretty decent student. I could have been an A student but I always had other priorities. I typically round out ever semester with a mixture of A's and B's and occasionally a C. For the first time of my schooling career, I am completely failing a class. Not a D even. I am failing. The feeling is terrible, and uncomfortable. Right along side with being terrible and uncomfortable, it is also a learning experience. I acknowledge that I am not putting enough of my time and energy into Chemistry to really understand the complicated subjects, and my regular methods just don't work. A lot of factors are going in to this failure. I could blame a lot of it on the professor who has not taught the class in over twenty years, or the uncoordinated recitation sections. The blame has to sit on your lap and purr at least a little bit though, and I have a lot of other things that I have chosen to spend my time on instead of chemistry study. I accept that, and I also accept that my procrastination may result in me taking chemistry again in my very last semester of my undergraduate degree. I do feel like there are some tips to help you cope with failure, as well as respond properly to your friends and family when they fail.
Do Not Discredit Failure
One of the most hurtful things you can do to yourself or to someone else is discredit their failure. Just because you had no trouble with something doesn't mean that it will be just as easy for everyone else. Every individual comes from a completely unique place, where things in their lives are organized differently from you. You may excel in a subject in school that another person struggles with painfully. Do not, I repeat, do not ever say to someone "Well to me ____ subject is really easy, I don't know why you are having trouble with it." This statement has a lot of things wrong with it. Starting a sentence with 'to me' is perfectly acceptable when describing your feelings, and owning that they are yours and yours alone. However, once you say 'I don't know why YOU" you are saying to a person that you don't understand why they aren't just like you. You know everyone is different, so just don't say it. Of course you don't know why they are having trouble with something, they aren't you and you aren't inside of their head dealing with their problems. This brings me to my next section.
Nothing is beneath you
You might think a subject is cake. That doesn't mean you should stop giving it attention. Love that you have that delicious piece of math or whatever else cake in front of you. Learn more. Go until the cake is gone and you do have trouble with a subject. Once you have reached that struggle, you can understand that that threshold of struggle is important and just might be in a different place for each person. I hear a lot of people say they don't have time to study subjects outside of school. You just aren't making time. How many times do you turn on the TV and just sit there when you don't really have anything you want to watch? What if every time you did that instead you opened up a book you have been meaning to read? How much more would you get done? Now I'm not saying that you can't ever sit down to the TV. As long as your down time has just as much intention to it as your study time. If you say to yourself that 'this time is me time' then your down time has more intention than 'I just got off work and I don't know what I am doing.'
Shit happens
Your boyfriend will break up with you two days before your test. Your cat will get sick before your big performance. Shit just happens. You won't always be performing at your 100% with everything you do, and sometimes you will mess up big time. When this does happen, it is so incredibly tempting to blame it on someone else. I do it, I know other people do it. You do poorly on a test, and it was because the professor wasn't clear with what would be on the exam. You got in to a fender bender, and it was because the other person was driving too slow in front of you. We are all guilty of this. What I say is let yourself make those internal accusations at first, just think them all out. Get mad about it. Once you are done with your blame party, look at yourself and see what YOU could have done better. Don't get angry at yourself for it, but just acknowledge what it is. Whether it was that you should take a few deep breaths when you get stressed driving and try to drive a few miles an hour slower or to make your own study guide of what you think would be on a test to go with the given study guide. Keep your blame party to yourself, and then react in a more self aware way.
Repeat Humbly
As tempting as it is to 'hate' whatever you failed at (I am very bad at this), try to see the good in your failure. I try to remind myself that chemistry is hugely important for my degree, and if I think of it in strictly biology based ways it is a lot more interesting to me. Try not to be embarrassed when you need to re-take a class. Try to learn things that you didn't see the first time, instead of spending the whole time grumbling about how much time and money you are wasting. You don't want to have to repeat the process a third time, so do it right the second time. Try to see what you did wrong before and make adjustments as needed. Don't be too hard on yourself. You may never learn to love whatever it is, but if you can even say you got through it, you can say a lot more than the person who gave up the first time.
