There is a short list of things that scare me.
I’m afraid of drowning. It’s unlikely to happen since I am a decent swimmer and have no intentions of taking a cruise across the Atlantic any time soon, but it scares me nonetheless.
I’m afraid of falling. I used to be afraid of heights. I got over that for the most part. However, the idea of plummeting hundreds of feet to my death isn’t how I’d prefer to go.
I can handle a lot of things. I’m good in a crisis, I don’t faint at the sight of blood or a serious injury. I find haunted houses and horror movies more thrilling than scary, and I have been elected to be the designated-spider-killer in every house I’ve lived in. Despite these things, I wish I was as fearless as I pretend to be.
I have a crippling fear of failure – which is pathetic if you think about it.
In my twenty-something years, I have done more than my fair share of fucking up. That doesn’t mean I always learned from my mistakes (you know, like you’re supposed to).
While I was growing up, I was never a very good student. Not because I was stupid, I was too stubborn for my own good. My parents hounded me about my grades for years. They knew I wasn’t performing to my full potential. I think it bothered them because they thought I didn’t care about my education.
Contrary to what they thought, I did care. I cared so much that it kept me from trying at all.
At such a young age, I couldn’t communicate that the thought of doing my best just for it to not be enough was heartbreaking. Anything short of perfect wasn’t good enough for me. I would rather get bad grades on purpose by turning in work far less impressive than what I was capable of. The assignments that I could be bothered to turn in – which was a rare occurrence in itself – were always half-assed and inauthentic.
Every semester, my mom would get so irritated to the point where we would get into screaming matches when I got home from school and she would pull me from whatever team I was on at the time until I got my grades up. Then the following semester, to no one’s surprise, I would do the same shit. Every semester, without fail.
This shitty trait of mine pissed off a lot of people. My family was ashamed of me, my teachers were always left disappointed, but believe me when I tell you that no one hated this about me more than I did.
Unfortunately, this bad habit followed me far past middle school. This trend continued throughout high school and came with me when I went to college.
In addition to a lot of personal shit I was going through my sophomore year, my academic performance continued to deteriorate. Up until this point in my college career, I was actually doing okay. This leg of my education was too expensive to keep pulling the same shit I got away with in high school.
By the spring semester, my whole world was falling apart around me. I was extremely depressed, hardly getting out of bed even to make the three-minute walk to the dining hall. I would leave my dorm room for my shifts at work, and sometimes I would go to the bar at night. I stopped going to golf practice and most of my classes by midterms, slowly accepting the fact that I couldn’t handle college.
Some of my professors tried to reach out to me to get me to come to class, others gave up after a couple measly emails. My favorite professor actually texted me a few times, worried about my well-being. All of these people reaching out to me were trying to save me from the hole I was digging myself into, but I didn’t expect them to understand how much weight I was bearing. I couldn’t explain to these people I barely knew that it was heavy enough to walk to the bathroom, let alone across campus just to be too far behind in my work to catch up.
The longer I stayed in my dorm room, the harder it got to face what I had done. I was absolutely sure that I had just ruined my entire future.
It wasn’t long before my worst fear became my reality.
By May, I had failed almost every single class.
And I dropped out of college.
I have never been so embarrassed about something before. I couldn’t tell my friends that I would no longer be walking at graduation with them, and I sure as hell couldn’t tell my family.
How could I have been so stupid?
How could I have fucked up this badly?
For a long time, I didn’t tell a soul. I got away with saying I was taking a “gap year” for a while, convincing people I needed to figure things out. I went about my life, miserable as ever, wondering what to do with myself. I started working two full-time jobs and drank every night, drowning out the voice in my head telling me it was my fault that my future was ruined.
Eventually my coach caught on to how much I was dealing with. I will never forget the look on his face when I told him what was going on inside my head. Much to my surprise, he said that he couldn’t tell what I was going through because I appeared to be handling everything so well.
He was the first person I told that I dropped out. To which he responded,
“So did I.”
He told me about his college career, and how he fucked it up. I never could have guessed how similar our stories were, seeing as he turned out just fine and seemed to be so content with where he was in life. It was so bizarre to me that not only did I not know this huge detail about him, but he now lived in such an amazing place, working at a job that he loved. Happy.
It took me a long time to realize that I am not just my mistakes. Do mistakes shape us? Sure they do, but a person is so much more than a letter grade, or a bad review, or one serious fuck up.
One of my closest friends told me that fucking up doesn’t make someone a fuck up. It makes them a person.
I try to remind myself of that.
After I left school that spring, I spent the following year kicking myself, absolutely defeated. I was upset about not being on the same schedule as my best friends. I still struggle with that sometimes, but their life schedule isn’t my schedule. I thought I would be graduating in 2023, but the life experience I’ve gained outside of school is worth more to me than an imaginary deadline.
In the year and a half that I’ve been out of school, I learned so much about myself that I may not have if I was still in college. Until I dropped out, my identity has been tied to being a student, or being an athlete. I’ve done a lot of work trying to see myself as a person first. Because I’m no longer attending that university, I discovered more places I’d like to live, and I now know where I want to finish my college education.
I recently applied to a few schools and soon I will be facing my next step. I registered for classes yesterday, and in just over a month I will be moving over 1,000 miles away to live in a town I’ve never been to.
I’m terrified.
I’m afraid that I’ll fail. I don’t know if I’ll do well in my classes, or if the pressure will get to me. I might hate the place I chose to live. I could get there and if it’s not what I want, I will have to start over again.
So what?
If we weren’t supposed to make mistakes, if we were supposed to be right about everything all the time, our decisions and our process of making them would be far less interesting.
We are so often scared of doing the “wrong” thing, and I am no exception. It took me a long time to figure out that fucking up, being wrong, and failing are not worth being scared of. Failure is not a setback – it’s progress.
It’s just life, and it’s about time we stop taking it so seriously.
Yours truly,
Kristin
love always, kristin 
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