Fear of Failure

I left in the middle of class last Thursday.

We had started using our new textbook, which includes very little writing in English, and which I didn't purchase in hard-copy, settling for the much cheaper online version. Thursday's class was the first to indicate that a lot of content from the hard-copy book is not included in the online version.

I felt immediately at sea when Eihab began our lesson on a new verb and some new vocabulary, even though I had spent several hours working on the homework.

It seems our classwork has taken an exponential leap forward.

My stomach knotted as I tried to write phrases with the new words, gleaning their spelling from my neighbor's textbook. I tried to remain calm, to focus on absorbing Eihab's vague instructions about definite articles that attach to adjectives and not nouns.

My neck got hot. Tears welled unbidden in my eyes.

To avoid an embarrassing breakdown in class, I went to the ladies' room. There, my anxiety did not quell, but rather bloomed into a deep sense of frustration.

I do NOT want to be here repeated in my mind's ear.

So I went back to class and started gathering my things. When Eihab, who was circulating among the students to help with the required sentences, came up to me, I told him—in halting Arabic—that I had a small problem and needed to go home. He was kind and accommodating, waving me off with a gentle smile.

As I walked down the hill toward the Polsky building where I would have to report to my job in a little more than an hour, my anxiety morphed into a vague depression.

You see, I have a terrific fear of failure.

My self-esteem has long been linked to academic grades. From my earliest memory, I was always proudest of myself when my parents praised my straight-A report cards. The only time I got a C in high school, in a history class, my mother went to speak to the teacher, then supervised long hours of extra homework to make it up.

This lesson made a deep impression on me.

I was never comfortable in any of my undergrad classes unless I was certain that mine was the highest grade in the class. Anything less than a full A was a failure in my eyes. I did a group project in a Japanese Studies class that received a collective B+, and I panicked. I emailed the professor, met with her in her office, and insisted on doing an extra-credit project to raise my own grade to an A. Likewise, when I took an essay exam in Humanities in the Western Tradition, I walked on clouds for a week because of the professor's note on my blue book: 100% Perfect.

Knowing this about myself, I have made a decision about my strategy for the next four weeks, the final four weeks of the semester.

I am going to make myself get comfortable with failing.

Or, at least, with being less than the best student in the class.

When I got to class on Tuesday this week, Doug was already there, as he usually is. Doug is a nice enough young man of about 20 who talks a little too loud and a little too long, and who enjoys a role-playing game that he insists is very different from Dungeons and Dragons. He and I are usually the first ones in the classroom, and we often chat amiably before the others arrive.

I asked him how the homework was for him, and he agreed with me that the class seems to have become exponentially more difficult with this new textbook. He had the same confusion and questions about the new grammar points as I did, the same frustration with memorizing vocabulary, the same difficulty with keeping up.

The only difference for Doug was that he was not at all concerned about these difficulties. He seemed to believe they were just a normal part of the learning process, and that they would eventually gel into a substantive ease with the new language.

His calm acceptance of possible failure calmed me.

During class, I worked with Grant, who is arguably the best student in our class. As we struggled through new conjugations and gendered nouns, Grant intimated some of his own confusion about certain aspects of the exercise.

At one point, Grant whispered to me, "What is he saying?"

Eihab had been running through some sentences that we were to parrot back, but I couldn't understand him. I felt immensely relieved that Grant couldn't understand, either.

My husband is counseling me to "do the bare minimum; just get through it." I appreciate his support, but that is not easy for me to do.

I am working on it, however.

I was surprised how quickly I got used to sitting there dumbly in class Tuesday, letting the silence stretch out when Eihab asked us what something meant. Usually, I am the first to offer an answer, unwilling to admit that I might not know the answer.

After about the third time, a bemused grin and slight shoulder shrug started to feel okay.

Failure, as anyone giving advice will tell you, is a necessary part of success. But failure doesn't feel like success. It can feel like, well, failing. And I am in the enviable position of not having experienced a lot of failure in my life.

My goal for these next four weeks is to get more and more comfortable with walking into a situation where I don't know what will be asked of me or how I will respond to those demands.

This will help, in particular, as I begin my new job, as a Staff Writer for Akron Life magazine.

That is a position that I feel pretty much prepared for, though there will likely be assignments and jobs that are scary and foreign to me. I have to have the right mental toughness to keep my fear at bay and jump into these unknown areas with some measure of confidence if I want professional magazine people to take me seriously.

Facing this fear and forcing myself to embrace it is one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. That might seem ridiculous when you consider that I'm taking this class for "fun" rather than for a degree requirement, but that doesn’t make the fear any less real.

Already, though, after just one class of laying back and leaning into the not knowing, I'm feeling better about it. Everyone in class stumbled and had a hard time repeating complicated phrases correctly. All of us got it wrong at least once, then got it right on another try.

Why does forgiving myself and being gentle with myself seem so much harder than doing likewise with others? Perhaps allowing myself to be less than the best in this class will help me be kinder to myself, and in turn allow me to be kinder and more empathetic with others.

Maybe it really is true that all I have to fear is fear itself. And acknowledging this is already a giant leap toward conquering that fear.

Writing and Survival Skills

When a student came for tutoring last week, she took out a folder as she searched for the essay she wanted to work on. I glanced at the red folder on the table and was struck by what she had written on it in thick black marker:

Writing & Survival Skills.

Huh. There was talk in some of my MFA workshops of writing as a survival skill, writing as a way of coping with trauma or mental health issues. And many of our workshops turned into therapy sessions for some of us.

Indeed, the first summer after my dad died unexpectedly, I channeled my grief into every writing prompt my undergrad professor threw at us. A strong response to music? My dad's funeral. Writing about the body? My dad's enormous body in a coma in a tiny hospital bed. A short narrative about myself? My connection with my dad through our shared love of tattoos.

All these essays were more therapy than literature, though I still think some of them are quite good. And I still—six years later—have a strong urge to keep writing about my dad, if only to keep alive the feeling that he is still part of my everyday world.

When I saw that title on that student's folder, I wondered if she realized how philosophical that particular grouping of words was for me. Most likely, she didn't. For her, they are simply two classes she is taking this semester. They are nothing more than two sets of assignments for the folder's two pockets, two schedules to keep straight, two hoops to jump through on her way to a degree.

I imagine she never gives those words or their relationship to each other any thought at all. For me, however, writing and surviving are almost synonymous. My day-job, after all, is tutoring writing. Insomuch as one's job is one's survival, I live on writing.

Joan Didion said that she writes to understand what she thinks about the world. Stephen King called writing a form of magic.

I often think of writing as a chore or obligation, like scooping the poop out of the cat box every day. If I don't do it, I'll eventually have to deal with an even bigger mess.

Even this post I'm writing right now is a kind of survival. I don’t really have anything to say, but I know that if I don't write anything, I'll have an even bigger mess in my head the next time I sit down to write.

Also, I'm avoiding studying for the Arabic quiz I have on Thursday.

Survival, obligation, avoidance: they're all just ways of scooping the poop out of the litter to avoid or prepare for the bigger messes life always seems to have in store for us.

So don't judge me too harshly, either about this post or about my poor study habits. I'm merely practicing my writing and survival skills.