Embracing Failure

It's not about failure: it is about accepting that you will produce SO much garbage work and these ugly, awkward, and horribly executed ideas are NECESSARY stepping stones in the process of honing your vision.

The summer of studying for the GRE and overloading on reading and writing a forty-page manuscript to submit to a slew of professional writers to pursue my M.F.A. in Creative Non-Fiction was one of great stress and self-doubt.

Like Michelle Herman had once said on a panel of successful writers being asked questions by hopeful writers, that unlike many other professions, they liked to see students who went out and lived a little in the world first before they applied to graduate school. What would they write about otherwise?

An amazing professor who said yes to writing my letter of recommendation, suggested I re-write my letter of intent as it sounded a bit "self-deprecating." (That one has stood out for a long while in my memory.)

I did not graduate cum laude with a 3.5 GPA.

I graduated like a regular person with a 3.48 GPA.

Things like that largely petted my peeves and I hated that on paper I look like I had the four year experience I did: straight A's to an A minus once that led to a few fuck-it B's and even an unintentional and absolutely abhorrent C+ in Microeconomics that brought me to my knees in disappointment at my greatest marked failure to date.

I was not proud of my downhill grades, even though, in hindsight, I guess I made it out okay.

What I did gain from college was a shit-ton of amazing ideas, theories, and brilliant insight into many branches of a grand institution.

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