What Failure Teaches You that Success Can’t

It all started at the end of freshman year.

It was the last day of school, and I vividly remember sitting in Japanese teacher Chie Helinski’s homeroom, my foot nervously bouncing up and down, while I tried in vain to not think about report cards. The room was buzzing, and everyone was talking about their grades, but since my last name starts with an S, I knew the excruciating wait for my transcript would be longer than that of most other kids in my homeroom.

When Ms. Helinski finally called out my name, I got up, swallowed nervously, and walked over to her desk, all the while actively keeping a straight face as I cracked open the folded paper and took a small peek. To my surprise, my average was exceedingly higher than I’d expected.

“Dr. Barrow blessed my grade!” I practically yelled to a friend who sat beside me.

“Dang,” he laughed. “Wish she blessed me.”

When I went home that day, I was ecstatic. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the warnings of almost every upperclassman I’d met so far—that at Stuyvesant, most kids fell flat on their faces, their grades plummeting from middle school. But I’d gone and received a grade higher than I ever predicted. I thought for a second that maybe, just maybe, I was smart.

Come sophomore year, I had to deal with a whole new set of expectations for myself. In my mind, I had succeeded the year before, and everyone said that this year would be a breeze, so I had no reason not to do well. I truly believed that I was smart. I believed that I was capable of doing well in my classes despite their difficulty because I’d pull through somehow. It had happened last year, and I was sure it would happen again.

I lacked a plan. I thought that even if I didn’t work hard, some high school fairy would come and bless my grade, as some teachers did for me during my freshman year.

As the school year progressed, I started to panic. I felt hopelessly lost in computer science. I was completely unused to my chemistry teacher’s lecturing style. Spanish tests turned from simple memorization to difficult writing questions that forced me to think.

When testing season came by, I was hammered by loss after loss. I broke a few laughably tragic records when it came to academic assessments: lowest test score ever, lowest quiz score ever. With each low grade, I pushed myself further and further down an abyss of despair. I had no idea how to pull myself out of it; I was repeating the same study routine that succeeded in my freshman year, but now, I was getting obliterated by difficult test questions. I blamed it on “hard teachers.” I blamed the programming office. I blamed the workload. I blamed everyone but myself.

It’s true that some people will be blessed with easy teachers and that others will have to self-study physics from their own textbooks. I sometimes wanted to scream with rage, knowing that if I’d only gotten a different teacher, half the effort would have rewarded me with double the points. I boiled with self-pity, often asking myself, “Why me?”

The truth is, there is no why; or as we Gen Z-ers like to say: “It be like that.” As Cheryl Strayed so rightfully wrote in the advice column The Rumpus, you don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt, but you do have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’ve been holding.

I wish I had a perfectly apt epiphany, encapsulated in a single, inspirational moment, to conclude this narrative. But I don’t. I only came to the single, most important realization of my sophomore year after I fell so short of my expectations that I was on the verge of giving up, and no individual occasion could realistically capture the slow destruction of my willpower.

I doubted myself. I stopped thinking rationally and listened to the very emotionally-based voice in my mind that constantly whispered, “What’s the point if you’re just going to do badly regardless of whether you study or not?” “You could save yourself so much heartbreak if you just let go.” I almost did. I had to reconsider how much I wanted a good GPA, and I realized that I wanted it a lot. I wanted it so much that I had to cross “giving up” out of my options list. I had to stop listening to my wounded self-esteem and make logical choices. If I was doing poorly on my Spanish tests because my current study habits were ineffective, then I would have to change my study routine again and again until I was satisfied with the results. I had no alternative but to accept the inevitability of the mistakes I would make along the way.

I will proudly tell the world that I got a 77 on my first CS test or that I once carried a chemistry quiz bearing the mark ⅓ home in my bright blue folder-for-everything. Because what the world doesn’t know is that I got both assessments dropped, and after working like a machine into the AM’s, practicing Python scripts and balancing equations, I pulled my final grades up further than I ever could have hoped.

Society is filled with half-baked truths, and there is a larger story to everything, known or not. I had to endure the judgmental glances of those who once believed I was a “scholar,” but it is impossible to escape judgment based on these fragments of reality, so do yourself a favor and let the haters hate. Instead of letting them affect you, focus on your own faults and fix them the only way you know how: by seeking help, working harder, and changing your habits. No “high school fairy” will do that for you.

If I could go back in time to sophomore year program changes, I wouldn’t, despite the possibility of my grade becoming significantly higher. I didn’t see it then, but failing over and over and over again has helped me realize—as cliché as it sounds—the value of hard work. It humbled me and showed me how resilient, intelligent, and diligent many Stuyvesant students are. It taught me that success will only come to you if you really truly want it—in Stuyvesant and the real world. It showed me that everyone else at Stuyvesant was in the same boat as I was; my case wasn’t special, and I was actually relatively lucky with the teachers I had. It forced me to re-think my work ethic and virtually eliminate procrastination from my life through sheer self-motivation and willpower.

Now that’s something that perfect grades can’t give you.