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It’s Okay to Fail
Forgive yourself and move on.
Being a person that likes to win all the time, failing really took a toll on me. For the longest time, failure wasn’t in my books; it wasn’t something I planned for. The first time I failed a subject in Primary 6, I refused to go home. I stayed back in school, crying my eyes out, till a teacher called my dad to take me home. In my little mind then, I had failed in life, and my world had ended.
My second academic “failure” was the first time I ever thought about committing suicide. I was the best in Mathematics in my Secondary school but had a C in the subject in my Senior WAEC exams. I expected an A, so when I saw a C, I called myself a failure and thought about drinking JIK bleach.
We are often so engrossed with success and failure that we forget to live. We forget that what’s most important in life is life itself. We plan and equip ourselves for when we succeed, but we forget to equip ourselves to deal with failure effectively.
In the year 2019, I decided to change jobs. The rejection emails I received from companies almost affected my mental health and self-confidence, so I had to learn ways to deal with my failures. Here’s how I’ve learned to deal with failure: