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on mistakes and giving up


evan
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i don't like to vent often. however today i'm feeling something i'm not used to and want to listen to what others have to say on the subject.

some personal context

i've currently been studying at school over the summer while also doing teaching at a few bands. this is on my parents' financial aid so it costs them quite a bit to let me do, but they want to help me graduate so they're okay with it. i'm still a little uncomfortable with the fact that i'm kind of a freeloader in that sense, but i'm trying to get better about doing work and doing well so they can feel like it's a worthwhile investment.

this week i got into a band camp. it's pretty strenuous even if you're teaching because you're going at it for about 10-12 hours a day and for the section i teach it is just nonstop note learning and refining, which is rough on the mind. i had to prepare for a political philosophy midterm at the same time. the mistake i made; the class is extremely difficult and i had not done much beforehand preparation, in part because i ended up busy all of the week before. i had anticipated there to be wi-fi at the site, but there wasn't so i had to wait in order to do a chunk of my work.

the stressors culminated into an inability to complete my work and falling behind on the timeline i had set up that would have helped me finish everything on time.

basically yesterday rolls around and i realize it's impossible. there's no way i was going to write three essays and make them all at the necessary level to pass the midterm, and i cracked. i tried to think of what to do, but realized there was no way for me to save my grade, realistically. were i to do perfectly on the midterm and other reading assignments, i'd still only be able to get my grade up to a D. 

i called my parents and told them i was withdrawing from a class and offered to pay it with all the money i had made teaching. however i then found out that withdrawals had closed just that week. so i would soon be losing not only a ton of money, but also possibly scholarships if the grade was low enough.

 

 

the above story is an example of mistakes. there's a number to comment on; not starting sooner, taking on too many gigs, taking too hard of a class. 

within that there are also reasons for those mistakes: a refusal to take a "whatever" class for the sake of gen eds, feeling a need to make income for something i should be expected to pay on my own, trying to prioritize my music based employment simultaneously, wanting to be able to manage stress efficiently.

 

at this point however i don't feel any emotional need to continue. this semester is not individual; it is part of a consecutive pattern. this happened last semester, and the one before it. i did not fail any classes the spring before that but i lost many friends. i had the same problem of not doing very well with the drumcorps i marched, not getting over my social anxiety, and certainly doing quite awfully on my college auditions, despite having the complete potential to do better.

 

i have to ask this forum:

when you find yourself in a trend of consistent failures, how do you think about where to go from there?

i'm at the point where i want to drop out, but the guilt of the amount of money i would have made my family waste is too much to even consider it. yet at the same time, when i think about doing anything i only worry that it will be one long fuck up.

thus i don't know what to do with myself anymore.

i know the old adage. "you're too hard on yourself, everybody makes mistakes". i just also no longer have the capacity to believe mistakes of this caliber are "being too hard" and rather are just "not capable of doing the right things."

 

so i just have to ask people how they think about stuff like this.

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I have a friend in a similar situation, and I didn't know what to tell him either. I guess it's because I can't really empathize with the idea of going to college at someone else's expense, even if it was family that's just not something I would consider. That said however, my parents have told me repeatedly that they are always willing to help out if ever I needed it.

So what is the situation with yours? Will they understand if you can't make it, or will you be out on your ass if you fail? If you feel indebted to them, maybe it would be better to focus on pursuits that can make you money for the time being and come back to school when you're in a more stable position?

 

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I wish I could give you some advice, but I'm not anyone to ask about getting out of holes myself. I know what failure and giving up feels like pretty well. I'm still stuck in one myself that I fell into 3 years ago.

For me it started with when I flunked out of school, but I didn't have any good reason for it. I just simply didn't put in the work I should have and got what comes from that. I thought it would be a small set beck and I'd get back to it after taking some time off to recoup. Before I was living in a shared place with a friend, had a job, a car and was independent and had the time for school. I was doing fine until my car happened to die shortly after. "Okay I'll just have to get another one before I can get back on track."

Well no it wasn't that simple. I dealt with public transport for a while and just focused on looking for something I could afford, but then my job became decisively worse when the manager left and the boss was pretty much the only one running that store. You see around the time that minimum wage had gone up, and was now matching what I was getting paid in the first place. We all went to have a talk with our owner and see if we could get something now that it's come to this but we all got a no go for that. That suck's, but it was worth a try. I forget about it for a few weeks until a new guy starts working with me an offhandedly comments "Man this jobs pretty good for being 50 cents more than minimum." Yeah turns out he was hiring new guys for more than he was paying us now. Not to mention I was trained to use a forklift for the place and able to work drawer if needed. But no guy hired to just water plants is making more than me now. I shouldn't have done it, but I quit that day. That was the second huge mistake I made, because I couldn't find another place to work soon enough.

I had to give up the apartment I was in, rent was too much for me now. A friend took my place so my roommate could stay and I moved in with my parents. I shit you not, 1 month later their rent goes up beyond what they can pay. The housing place didn't even know I was there yet. So now the rest of my family has to cram into the only place they have, my grandmothers tiny little place with just enough room for everyone minus one. Yup I'm out of another place to live.

I dunno if I had a better option or not, but the best looking plan I had was to move in with my father down in the middle of god damn nowhere, Ohio. There was room, so I figured I could get a job down there for a while and come back after a few months with enough saved up to coast for a bit. He was also getting over a surgery and needed a bit of help for a few weeks. It seemed like a good idea. There were no jobs. there was almost nowhere to work. neither of us had a car and public transport isn't a thing.

So then I spent a year, unemployed, away and out of contact from my friends at home. I had a few people online who still did and that was about it. I have never been more isolated. I mean I lived with my father, but he was such a stranger to me we barely said anything. He'd get a ride to his job and I would almost never see him. I drank. A lot. Much more than I do now, and people worry about me now. I slowly watched the last of my money burn away and spent 90% of my awake time digging into shows/games/music/movies or anything that I use for escapism. I tried to find somewhere to work for like 6 months before I fully gave up. I spent a lot of my time in bed and barely ate. I knew what I was doing and I just didn't care. I had actually given up. and I was this way for about another 6 months. I had dark thoughts, lots of self loathing. I still blame myself for everything that lead me there. I thought more than a few times about ending it, to be honest. I know what being absolutely useless is and feels like, and not feeling like you have anything you can do about it.

55 minutes ago, evan said:

when you find yourself in a trend of consistent failures, how do you think about where to go from there?

I wish I could tell you how I got out of it myself, but I didn't. People dragged me out. My family caught wind somehow of how bad things were going for me, I couldn't even tell them. They now had a place I could stay, albeit uncomfortably, back in my hometown. When I got here again I just worked as hard as I could to get everything back. I didn't think about anything else. I just went at it and I'm still not out yet. I haven't really even told this to anyone in full before because I try not to focus on it now. I have a lot of good things going for me right now and I'm still burdened by it.

Evan, I just hope you can land on your feet at some point soon, before you get to the point I was at. I wouldn't wish that on anyone, and would hate to see a friend fall into that.

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Inability to prioritize. Decide which goals are most important. Pick the most important one. Do that and do it well. You tried to do too much at once. 

After you committed to too many things you participated in moral bargaining. Doing one thing and then saying to yourself it's okay not to do other things because that one thing is more important. They were all important and you really screwed up. Own all of your mistakes. You can't go back in time and fix it but you can make sure it never happens again.

You actually don't know what you want to do in life. If you can't figure that out you pick one thing and do it really well until you manage to make up your mind. I still don't know what I want to do with my life but I show up at work every day and do an excellent job because it makes sense to do that until I figure things out. 

Own your mistake and apologize to everyone that you're hurting and letting down. Know that what you have done hurts them more than it hurts you. Using people and walking away is a terrible thing to do. If you do quit make a commitment to pay back everything you cost them. If you don't quit then pass and graduate. Try not to be selfish. Appreciate what other people give you. They are being very un-selfish by helping you. 

School isn't hard. Lots of people graduate. All you have to do is get the work in on time. If you're smart enough to get in you are smart enough to pass. So if you're not passing it's because you're choosing not to which is a very sad choice. You're doing this on purpose and the only question is if it is consciously or on a subconscious level. Talking to a professional might help. Good luck. Don't be a dick to people who love you.

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Perhaps it's not that you aren't capable of doing things but you simply don't know how? You've evidently identified all of your pitfalls so you are learning, now all you have to do is apply what you've learned. It really sucks that you've lost a lot over it, but now it's time to start again more prepared.

 

Maybe you could start limiting your activities? Think about your priorities, and decide on some core things that you must complete to get where you want to be. But see if you can work it out so that you won't have any trouble keeping up with that. Then, you can add other things but make sure that if you get overwhelmed again you can drop the unnecessary things in favor of your priorities. That way you'll have a way out planned ahead of time.

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The best thing to do is collect yourself, decide what you want to do and do better next time. 

I've overburdened myself a few times but good time management and organizational skills got me through it. Prioritize what is most important and go from there.

If you feel your job/side work are your passion do that for a while and save up some money. If school is your desire then focus on the classes, maybe to minor part time things. Never make those take precedence over school if you're going to go into massive debt because of grades. 

It's simple thinking that will help you a long way. It gets hard to do that when you have so many things going on at once. I'm sure things will work out for you in the end.

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You are a hot air balloon. All your responsibilities, worries, and distractions are ballasts. Your envelope can only hold so much hot air to keep you afloat. The ballasts aren't all bad; they keep you at the altitude you want to be so you can go where you need to. If you let too many of them weigh you down, though, you're going to scrape along the ground. We have to decide what and when to cut off when we're losing air.

By my third year of high school, I was just done with it all. My ballasts included AP classes, homework every night, the loss of three people I loved, a dysfunctional household, making it month to month financially, and a full realization of my gender dysphoria. I was running out of air. I had to take care of my mother; that ballast stayed. I had to make sure our money would last us the month; that ballast stayed. I can't cut off my emotional ties with people who have departed. That ballast is unyielding, and the heaviest. The dysphoria, I couldn't do much about. I told my friends and did research and all that made me feel a little better collectively, but it was still heavy. What was left was school. I cut some weight off of myself academically. Not completely- I did graduate- but enough that people were worried about how little I was caring about it. I selectively chose which classes I could afford to not care about and how much effort I would have to put into a class to pass it. There was no way I was passing anything if I didn't give myself that breathing room, between drunken episodes with family interrupting studying and my brother being... my brother. I did pass, though, with AP scores eligible for college credit and a sturdy 2.9 GPA.

All of that is to say that you've had a lot of ballasts, too, and when you scraped the ground the basket broke. You know and I know that this is something that's said and done, and I know you're smart. If you go back to school this year (and you'd best), you're going to pass this time with your lessons learned. For your sake, try to start with less ballasts next semester and take gen ed classes you know you'll pass.

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If you have people to back you and you know what you want to do in your future. You're not a freeloader.

If you're going to pursue all of this, you have the same stuff going on, you're going to jump through all of the hoops only to one day fall short, throw the brakes on and throw everything away. You're a freeloader.

You sound invested, keep the attitude you have, and feel better about what you can do. You wouldn't imagine how many people take for granted the opportunity that they have, there are so many people that have their folks paying for everything and they couldn't give less of a fuck if everything falls through. There should be way more people out there like you, but there's not. An attitude like that will take you very far. You'll be fine, the worst fucking thing you can do is to call it quits.

 

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Echoing what others have already said, it looks like you took a bit too much on this semester. These mistakes happen and they're part of learning about your limits, what's reasonable to take on, and how to manage your time. But it's not the end of the world either, you're trying to do a lot of interesting things, and you can bounce back from this.

Don't drop out. You're a bright guy, Evan, and I know this is what you love. Finish this summer off as best as you can, and apply the lessons you've learned from this next semester. You can talk to me any time.

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7 minutes ago, Pignog said:

Echoing what others have already said, it looks like you took a bit too much on this semester. These mistakes happen and they're part of learning about your limits, what's reasonable to take on, and how to manage your time. But it's not the end of the world either, you're trying to do a lot of interesting things, and you can bounce back from this.

Don't drop out. You're a bright guy, Evan, and I know this is what you love. Finish this summer off as best as you can, and apply the lessons you've learned from this next semester. You can talk to me any time.

Good advice from a good person. 

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