Three of My Most Epic Fails

Failure is a good thing. It's proof that you're human and making an effort to do something. I believe that the only way to improve is to keep trying. A lot of times, people make assumptions about how I must have things together. Well, I don't. Sorry to disappoint you, it takes a lot of hard work to rebound from failure and it never stops. I'm committed to doing what I have to do to avoid bad quitting. To that end, I have had some pretty public and extremely embarrassing failures in my life, but I survived them and you can too.

Not that I have anything to prove, but since I want to encourage those who are considering bad quitting, I'm sharing three of my MOST EPIC FAILURES of all time here on the blog along with the lessons I learned from them. Drumroll please...

1. I didn't apply to a single college before I graduated from high school.

Somehow I missed the bus on that whole "apply to college by this deadline" discussion. I finished high school with a 3.6 something GPA, a Bright Futures Scholarship for use at any college in the state of Florida and no plan for life after graduation! Overall, I was a great student. I'd been enrolled in magnet programs and taken countless honors & dual enrollment classes. I had taken the ACT and SAT (and done well), but totally missed the application part. I could've beat myself up about it all and given up on college all together, but what good would that do?

At the age of twenty-three, when most of my high school pals were finished with college and building their careers, I was working full-time and had just started attending class full-time at the local junior college. In January 2007, after completing my Associates degree, I moved to Tallahassee, continued my education at Florida A&M University, starting working in my career field while enrolled in school and graduated at the very top of my class with a 3.97 GPA in the spring of 2009. I continued on to earn my Master's Degree in the fall of 2010. 

I won't say that it was easy and that I wasn't embarrassed sometimes about being a late-bloomer, but giving up wasn't an option. This setback motivated me to do things that I never thought I could ever achieve. Check out my bio and resume if you're curious about what I've been up to since graduation. 

2. I stayed in an eight year, long distance relationship that I knew wouldn't work.

It happens. People fail. Relationships fail. Things fail and sometimes (most of the time) that truth is hard to accept. But ignoring the truth about a situation doesn't help matters either. Before labeling this one an epic fail, I knew that I had done everything I could to make it work and was fine with ending things. Nonetheless, this fail felt different. It was very emotional. It was very public thanks to social media. Plus, it was supposed to defy the odds and succeed!  

After that relationship ended and the never-ending social media scrub began, I stayed single for a whopping two weeks. I agreed to meet my now husband for drinks six years ago. He was someone I knew and had never considered dating (Sorry, hubs! It's the truth though.) It was purely social. I was so ready to play the field and start dating. I mean, what was that even like? I had ZERO INTENTIONS of settling down with the first guy I hung out with. So when asked, I specifically told everyone that it was not a date! We were just hanging out. To my surprise, that non-date turned out to be the very best date that I had ever been on (or not been on). We got engaged ten months later and married two months after that on the anniversary of our first date.

My failed relationship taught me a lot about what I really wanted in my future husband and the type of relationship I wanted with his family. I learned a lot about the importance of trust and communication. When I started dating my husband, I knew what I wanted and could easily articulate it. Thanks to eight years of training, I wasn't easily deceived. I was filled with enough confidence to know that I didn't have to settle and that wasting my time was not an option. It also taught me that the opinions of others didn't matter. Who cares if people wondered why things didn't work out. I didn't owe anyone an explanation AND I didn't have a reason to be embarrassed. Life was happening. You live and you learn. That's kinda the way these things work. 

3. I moved to DC simply to check off a box on the "this is what people expect of me" list. 

Apparently, there's a list floating around somewhere that tells us all what we're supposed to be doing in life to prove to other people that we're doing something with our life. I muddled through it earlier on. That whole late start with college thing made me want to get the rest of the list right. So while I was in college, I worked hard to secure an internship with the federal government. It resulted in a job offer after graduation, which I gladly accepted! When people asked me what I was doing after college, I'd tell them my plan and watch as they tried to hide how impressed they were. It felt pretty good! A few weeks after graduation with all of my eggs in one basket, I moved to Washington, D.C. to work for the federal government.

Not long after my move, the super cool metro commute got super expensive and super exhausting. While working in the heart of DC never got old, I never spent a whole lot of time exploring the cool things about the city. For me "exploring" was walking by myself to Macy's and grabbing coffee from Au Bon Pain on my way back to my cubicle in the massive federal building I worked in. Braving the traffic each day on foot was a pretty big deal for me, though!

I thought moving was what I was supposed to do. I was pretty much told that if I didn't want to be considered a loser, I needed to move away to a big city and avoid moving back home at all costs! Well, if that was a sign of success, that's exactly what I wanted! So I embraced the big city and it's horrible traffic, started my federal job and promptly moved back home.

No one could understand why I left DC. To be totally honest, for a while I couldn't either. I didn't exactly know how all of this was supposed to work, but I knew that I wasn't happy there. I couldn't picture my life there. I had NO IDEA of what kind of job I wanted or what kind of work I could find back home, but I packed up and moved back to the not-so-big city of Pensacola and haven't regretted the decision once.

Life since the move has been pretty spectacular. I've been busy proving to myself that my hometown is filled with opportunity. I don't just sit around and wait for the opportunities to find me, I go out in search of awesome things to do and when opportunities are presented I'm usually prepared for them or have a pretty good idea of what I need to do get ready! I've been recognized for my leadership in the community, I serve as a director on a number of local boards, I've worked on some high profile design projects, was appointed to work on a committee by the mayor, taught at the same college I attended and best of all, I'm fortunate enough to be making a difference in my hometown.

What if I had listened to everyone who told me I just needed to tough it out in DC? What if I let my embarrassment about moving back home keep me from trying to find opportunities to excel? I'm glad that I don't know the answers to those questions and that I never devoted any energy to finding them out.

Welp, there you have it, my three most epic failures! What have you failed at lately?