Rebounding from Failure

 I am taking a break from discussing media to write something personal. Life can be brutal and life will give you setbacks. I would argue that is inevitable. What I would also argue, however, is that what truly matters most is how we respond to it. I know this because my high school years were defined by huge setbacks. I was homeschooled until my Junior year of High School and so simply going to school was a tremendous cultural shock for me. The first day I was lost and late to practically every class. By Lunch time I was thoroughly miserable and by the evening I was huddled underneath a blanket whispering to myself repeatedly "I wish I could back in time to when I was seven." High school would only get worse from there.

I do not want to act as if there were only bad times because that would be greatly misleading. I did well in my history classes, indeed I got an 115 in my 12th grade history class, and met some excellent teachers who I greatly respected and still enjoy communicating with. But these bright spots were overshadowed by my struggles in other classes, my constantly feeling as if I did not fit in with other people, and my utter failure to do well at standardized tests which led to my going to a college neither my parents had ever heard of. Ursinus College, while perfectly respectable, was a far cry from the famous schools my father and mother had attended, Williams and Oberlin, respectively. By the time I graduated high school, I felt as much of a loser as I possibly could. 

I was then faced with two choices: keep feeling that way or resolve to attack my college courses with a passion. I chose the latter and this was the beginning of a huge change in my life. Practically every night of my first year, I would stay up going over every math problem and teaching it to myself over and over. After much blood and sweat, I managed to earn a B in my Calculus class and I was immensely relieved. Though this was an immense relief, bigger changes for me were still to come and they arrived in my Sophomore year.

A huge change came when some classmates asked me for help on their Historiography papers. This gave me a purpose outside of just working for myself. I found working with others immensely fulfilling and I also realized that it was making a better person. Before doing this, I had been a condescending jackass to people who struggled as I thought they were just stupid. If that sounds like an awful thought, that's because it was. Helping others write papers helped me realize, however, that these people were perfectly smart. They had plenty of good ideas. They just needed assistance in realizing those ideas to their maximum potential. 

The other major change in my life came when I took my first film class and learned about the Male Gaze as theorized by Laura Mulvey. Though I had been raised by a fiercely feminist mother, I say that with praise and love, I am ashamed to say I had been single-mindedly interested in things like US history, military history, or memorizing every film date. Worthy pursuits perhaps, but lacking in social meaning. My realization that so many movies were shot by men for men, while omitting the views of women, opened the mental flood gates for me. Suddenly I became much more concerned with social problems and read as much feminist theory as I could. I began to fully realize just how much I had been sheltered from simply because I happened to be born male. This realization culminated in my creating an honors project on rape culture where I pushed myself still further to fully analyze and dissect some of the worst examples of injustice in our society. This project helped me realize I wanted to be a teacher not just to babble about history, but also to help students who might face discrimination. 

During this time I also did increasingly well academically. From my second semester of my sophomore year to the present I have succeeded at getting a perfect GPA every semester. During the Summer of one year, I took a Geology class and though I briefly flirted with falling back into the bog of high school anxiety, I had learned my lesson from those days. I created flash cards for every single term and studied into the early morning with the intent of memorizing everyone of those terms. The effort was successful as I passed the course with an A.  

Therefore, just four years since my High school graduation, I graduated again, but this time it was from college. Yet this time I was in a completely different state. I had made friends, I had graduated Summa Cum Laude, and I knew that in the Fall I was going to one of the top 50 Education schools in the country to get a masters in education and social studies. All of these accomplishments, however, paled to how I had become more of a complete person. I say more because I know I have a long way to go in terms of emotional and mental growth which is as it should be. The moment we think we know everything is the moment we in fact know nothing. We must constantly push ourselves forward and never let failure drag us down.