Dealing With Failure. How to Overcome The Voices In Your Head.

Nessa Onye
5 min readJan 11, 2022

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Most nights, I cry myself to sleep. Other nights, I don’t even sleep at all. This is one of those nights.

Failure is more of a state (of mind) to me. An emotion that I feel is often dismissed because we’re always told by friends and family to not let it break us, rather we should let it make us and we aren’t allowed to express how we feel at that particular point because we’re expected to be strong and not cry or have a full mental breakdown. Be strong and hold it all in or better still, get over it and move on. No one talks about the process.

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Hello, my name is Vanessa and currently, I don’t feel like the best winner in the world right now. What could have gone wrong you might ask? well, here goes; I failed my pre-clinical examination and I may or may not have to repeat the entire academic year. I know, it might not seem like that big of a deal to you, but coming from a straight-A student who has always been at the top of her class, it felt like my whole world had come to an end. I’m hoping that writing this article or story would give me some sort of peace and the strong will to go on, cause as we all know, it’s not the end of the world. Pre-clinical is an exam you take as a medical student studying to become a medical doctor to enable you to qualify into the clinical class and take on the big girl stuff like going to the teaching hospitals with the doctors who train and all of that good stuff where I school.

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It’s been only two weeks but these have been the slowest two weeks of my entire life. The first three days after I received the news, I cried so much every single day and night till my eyes got all puffy and I looked beat up. I had so many things running through my mind. I had so much self-blame and I also blamed others a lot. I kept thinking if the business I started on the side also contributed. I was warned that as a medical student, I won’t have time to handle a business and study at the same time, but I knew I could do it and so I went ahead. I blamed myself so much for that and even contemplated closing down the already registered business. What tore me apart, even more, was the fact that I was only 6(six) marks from the required cut-off mark. I distanced myself from friends and family. people who genuinely loved me and wanted to find out how I was doing couldn’t reach me cause I shut everyone out. I wasn’t taking any calls, I wasn’t responding to messages and I certainly wasn’t leaving my house. There I was for a full week, locked up in hiding from the world case I thought and I quote “my enemies are outside”. lol. I thought deeply that all they wanted to do was laugh at me for failing. But as we all know eventually, I was wrong. All of these thoughts, all of this self-blame, and bringing myself down were all in my head.

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That is, I feel, one thing we need to understand when dealing with failure. No one blames you. Yes, some things could have been done to avoid it, but in the end, no one is perfect and these things happen because failure in itself is part of life. How then do we learn if we don’t have mistakes to look back at to enable us to make better choices? I took back with me a whole lot of lessons during this whole experience. I also believe that when dealing with failure, we should constantly remind ourselves that things will get better, but we should also allow ourselves to feel in that moment. Feel every single emotion that your heart desires you to feel in the moment for you to recover from it. No one should make you feel like it’s easy because it’s not, but you can do it. You can get through it. It took me a whole week to come to terms with the reality of what happened to me, and I’m currently on a journey to moving forward. This in itself, is also another process and requires time. Starting again isn’t easy but it’s soo much better than giving up. I also currently have difficulties sleeping at night as this is currently 2:55 am and I am so tired but I can’t seem to sleep. This has been my life for days now but I’m not accepting defeat. I will get through this and you will too. No matter how hard it is or how hard it gets, let us promise ourselves that we would never give up on ourselves because we have so much potential and we got this. It’s not over yet.

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I wrote this story to let you know that you’re not alone and I’m with you on this journey. If you ever need anyone to talk to, you can always reach out to me and we can build a community or support system together. I am letting myself feel and heal through this journey. You should too. Don’t forget to do things that make you happy daily. I found myself binge-watching YouTube videos and moves and also listening to music because that gives me sanity. Also, you should try praying to God, it gives you this unexplainable peace, and spend time with Him daily. I hope you find peace in the end.
P.S.: no I didn’t close the business because that is what I’m passionate about. I’m developing systems to help make it run better.
-Vanessa

Originally published at https://byrslf.co on August 11, 2021.

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