If you follow me on Tumblr, you'll know that I recently bombed my philosophy course and finished with an F and 2.6 GPA. Luckily, I only needed a 2.5 to keep my scholarship, but ing , that is a really narrow gap, and I am still panicking over it. I'm the type of person who takes school very seriously and it honestly stresses me out so much. And as much as I want to just throw school around like a casual thing the way some of my classmates do, I just can't seem to do it. No matter how much I try to convince myself that my grades won't matter when I'm 50 years old, I still cannot help but stress and worry over it until it's 2 in the morning and I can't sleep.

I decided to make a blog post about it here because I like the fact that it's somewhat a little more private than Tumblr blogging. I just wanted to be able to get my thoughts out about this. And I know what you're probably thinking: poor smart girl, what could she possibly have to complain about regarding grades? Well, just as public service announcement, smart kids are equally, if not more, stressed out over school as kids who don't do well. It's because we're so conditioned to success that we become so anxious and afraid when we don't know the answer. It's why we are harsh on ourselves, and it's why we feel so cheated when something goes wrong. Bear with me, please. This is an issue that's close to me.

I got A’s and B’s in my other classes and the flop just brought my GPA to a 2.6 and I only need a 2.5 to keep my scholarship and the financial aid, but I’m still hyperventilating at the thought of having to tell my parents this. . UGGGHHH I mean, I know this is just a minor thing and I can always retake the class, but it all, and I’m sorry for all the cussing, but I just… 

School is so stressful for me. Like, even if I get good grades and stuff, I inevitably still freak out about it and I always try to tell myself that grades and school aren’t the most important things in life and people try to pound those ideas into me all the time, and I do know that life goes on and all this will eventually pass and 30 years from now, it won’t matter what I got in this class.

But I just can’t help but feel like total excrement when I mess up. Like, I can’t explain it. No matter what I do, I can’t get my mind off the fact that I completely screwed up, and I’ve been this way since middle school, and I really am trying to stop, but it’s hard. I try to ignore it, but I get to thinking that… ignoring it won’t make it go away, but when I try to face it head-on, I just start panicking and blaming myself. I’m so anxious. It’s really not fair how much of a person’s life depends on his or her grades. 

There’s so much pressure to do well in school and in college. And even if I have, for the most part, earned good grades, this whole system has just made me even more scared. I've thought a long time about what I want to do when I grow up, and I still am thinking about it. One option I'm weighing heavily is becoming a teacher. And I guess one reason that I want to be a teacher is because I want kids to know that grades really aren’t everything, and that they don’t have to be afraid of messing up… something that I wasn’t taught growing up. Even today there are kids who don’t go to the board and don’t raise their hands in class because they’re scared of messing up and getting the wrong answers. I wanna teach those kids that if they think they’re screwing up, they should come over to the real world and see how professionals do it. (i.e. the US government shutdown)

I mean, the whole grading system altogether. it all. Education is supposed to be about discovering new things and liberating yourself from ignorance and triumphing over and learning valuable lessons after struggling to understand, and it just totally blows that nowadays society has ruined it with this concept of grades, and if you don't get good grades, you basically get screwed over in life because employers won't want to hire you. I mean, how awful is it to live in a society that just won't forgive you for messing up even just once?

I used to be really arrogant about grades, too. In middle school and early high school, I used to flaunt my GPA to everyone, even people who didn't ask. Now I know that grades don't mean a thing in the real world. The only thing my stressing over having good grades has given me is fear. Education is supposed to be uplifting and liberating; yet the only real lesson school has taught me is to be afraid of myself, because I'm human and I have a terrible propensity to perpetually screw up. And while other kids have C's, D's, and F's, well they're at least braver. It's going to take me a very long time to stop being so scared of failure, and I know that I haven't offered much in the way of a solution to all this. But I know that there are some young kids on AFF who may benefit from what I struggled to learn:

Don't be like me. Don't be scared to be wrong. Go ahead and raise your hand, and go ahead and write on the board. Because grades aren't everything.