Failure: Navigating Life
By Anonymous
Picture it. You graduate with a 2:1, and, literally two days after Grad Ball, start something that, if it isn’t your dream job, then it’s as close to a dream job as you can possibly imagine. Not just that, but you’re working with people you love and respect and admire, in a place where you feel you belong. Your University experience wasn’t exactly sunshine and roses, but now, finally, it’s paid off, and you can’t wait to start this new chapter of your life.
And then you screw it up.
There’s no one incident in particular that leads you to realise this, but rather a slow, dripping effect. Every time you make a decision, which turns out to be a wrong one. Every time you leave a meeting or interaction and realise too late what you should have said rather than the garbage you came out with. Like I said, nothing goes horrifically wrong, but even when you’re coming into the office at 8am, and leaving 13 hours later, you feel ineffective, useless, like you’re letting down everyone who trusted you.
And that doesn’t just effect you. You genuinely thought of yourself as a good person, as someone who handled adversity well, but the stress, the long hours, the constant nagging sense of your own inadequacy starts to get to you, and you get nastier, less patient, with the people around you, the people you consider some of your best friends. Again, there are no permanent falling outs, but you disappoint them and annoy them and upset them without meaning to, and that Lady Gaga quote starts rattling around your head. “Trust is like a mirror. You can fix it when it is broken, but you can always see the cracks.”
You don’t know how to navigate friendships, or your job, or anything any more. This is just like when you were a stupid Fresher and didn’t know….
Wait.
You’re right. This is just like when you were a Fresher and didn’t know anything, and kept making mistakes and alienating people. And what happened then? You learned. You got better. You improved yourself by trial and error. You got through that, and you will get through this, and one day you’ll look back and be thankful for all those little failures that made you the (hopefully) functional human being you are.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that this doesn’t utterly suck.