Guest Blog Post: Failure

Our guest blogger tonight is Lisa Langley. Lisa is an amazing person. She is kind, caring, hilarious, and so eager to learn. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Lisa for a few years. She has been a substitute teacher and vital member of my school community. Sadly for us, she is moving on to better things. Tonight, Lisa brings you her thoughts on something we all dread… failure.

Failure

Failing is never easy. Sometimes we want something to work so badly that we get tunnel vision. We just keep moving in the same direction, expecting different results, but we are not doing anything differently.

My most recent experience of this was nursing school. To make this short, my family had experienced a life altering medical emergency and I found myself not just a stay at home mom to a 3 year old, a 7 year old, and 9 year old, but also caretaker to my husband. And, I had to make some hard decisions on what my family’s future was going to look like. After the initial shock, I decided to go back to college. My husband’s medical condition would never allow us to go back to the life we had, although at some point, life may become more “normal” (what really is normal?!). So, I knew that I needed to become the breadwinner of the family. After two years of basic college courses, I was accepted early into nursing school through a special program that I qualified for because of my high academic achievement and recommendations from professors. Basically, I was allowed to jump to the head of the waiting list and start my core credit courses immediately without a delay. However, about a year and a half into nursing school, I was burnt out. I had gained 40 pounds from stress, and I no longer knew who my family was. I spent long hours in class and in clinicals only to come home and have to lock myself in my room to study and work on clinical paperwork. I was barely sleeping. I lived on Coke Zero and Red Bull. And, then, the worst happened. I failed a class. I was absolutely lost. The feeling of not knowing where I was going and who I was going to be was crushing. At that point, I knew I had to move forward for my family, but I was no longer sure of what that looked like. I decided to take a semester off and tried to rejuvenate, thinking that maybe I was just overworked. However, when I went back the following semester, I failed again. I had never failed at something so big in my life, and I was even more unsure than before of how to pick up the pieces. My family was depending on me, so I had no time to wallow in self-pity. Instead, I decided to finish my associate degree in science, so I left the nursing program. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do after that, but I knew I had to do something. Giving up was not an option. During that semester, I did a lot of praying and soul searching. I realized that ever since I had been a little girl, I had always dreamed of teaching. In fact, when I was in nursing school, my end goal was to teach nursing. I suddenly came to the realization that I did not need to teach nursing; I could just TEACH.

Due to my husband’s medical needs at the time, I chose to continue my college education in an online college. There have been many difficulties there, but it fit my family's needs very well and allowed me to become a mom again, which is what I was missing in nursing school. Today, I’m looking forward to starting my student teaching rotation in August. Talking about my big failure still hurts. It still embarrasses me that I failed. But, today, I can look back and see that I was so focused on making it work, that I lost myself and what I was doing. I wanted to be a nurse because it was what I had set out to do. However, at some point, I knew that nursing was not where my heart was and it showed in my grades and my performance. Tunnel vision kept me from seeing that early on, but the important thing is that I did not allow it to define me. The most important lesson that I’ve learned from this is that it is okay to fail. It is okay to make mistakes. But, it is not okay to give up. Sometimes when things aren’t working the way that we want them to, it may be time to take a step back and reevaluate why you are doing what you are doing and what the end goal is. Failure is really only failure if you let it define who you are and what you do.