Failing Calculus Saved My Life

Photo by Jeswin Thomas on Unsplash

By putting the first chink in the armor of “perfection” I’d been constructing since I was a wee lass.

For me, perfection falls into the category of absolute words. Absolute words, for me, have one precise, immutable meaning. In my very concrete brain, perfection is elegance, grace, and most importantly, unmarred. To be perfect, you must complete something from beginning to end without flaw. Perfection allows no room for failure.

Like many kids who grow up in dysfunctional homes, I built my sense of worth around the notion that I would be lovable if I was perfect. Perfect meant that my work served as a clear piece of glass, allowing you to see or experience what you desired without noticing me at all. It was as if I felt called to mold myself into the invisible member of a theater tech crew. Everything right where it needed to be, when it needed to be, no deviations, no exceptions.

I showed up to college with this rigid structure already in place. And then, I failed my first semester of calculus. Hard and ugly. It turns out I couldn’t teach myself calculus. I understood about 70% of it, just not enough to pass.

I knew I’d failed before I turned in the final exam.

I spent two weeks at home, trying to avoid the conversation I was sure I would be having with my parents. I hid out in my room, sleeping. I diverted the conversation away from my grades. I avoided commenting on my brother’s school experience.

Then, the paper showed up in the mailbox. I couldn’t avoid the truth any longer.

Perfection is impossible.

I wish I could tell you, Dear Reader, that looking at the 12-point Times New Roman letter “F” next to Mathematics II, at that very moment I started to change.

I can’t. Because the story about the necessity of perfection I had been telling myself since I was a wee lass planted its boots firmly in the ground of my soul and said, “Well, we’ll just have to try harder.”

You guessed it, I doubled down.

That perfectionist who graduated high school with the unofficial title of ‘Most Likely to Die of Multiple Bleeding Ulcers” became a young woman on a mission. There would be no loose threads. Everything would be accounted for. I would be perfect, and then I could be loved.

Then, tragedy struck when my father died, and any mooring I messiness, grace, and being in the flow evaporated. As I unspooled, the idea of perfect went from this thing to achieve to a bludgeon.

Over the next decade, “you’re not lovable because you dropped a minus sign” morphed into “you’re not lovable because that email was six minutes late” into “you’re not lovable because you don’t trust God enough.”

In so many ways, my brain pointed out how my lack of perfection made me categorically not lovable.

That habit of looking for the imperfect spilled out into everything. My inner dialog overflowed with the pointing and the reminding. I cataloged my flaws, your flaws, the guy pushing my groceries flaws. If I could find something wrong, I would.

I exhausted myself looking for imperfection. I scourged my soul raw with degrading and dehumanizing mental talk. I deconstructed people to the point of being unrecognizable.

I was fugly. In responding to this rigid definition of perfect, I’d become this angry, mean person I didn’t want to be around.

Luckily, when navel-gazers don’t want to be around themselves, we start digging. Why? Where? When? I followed so many threads. I told myself so many stories.

Then, one day, walking in a park talking aloud to myself (as one does), I asked, “Will I die if I’m not perfect? Will anyone else die?”

And then, I heard myself say, “Probably not, given that failing calculus didn’t kill ya.”

I stopped looking for perfect that afternoon.

I stopped saying perfect that afternoon.

Why did I go with such a drastic cold-turkey route?

Because that afternoon, my instinctive response was, “Fuck that shit. I am not wasting my time on that.”

Now, there are schools of thought that suggest you should reclaim a word that you find troubling. For me, the definition of some words live in my body. That is, my body reacts to the word long before my prefrontal cortex has as translated. Finding a way to reframe those bodily-defined words can be done. It takes a metric ton of effort, and it didn’t seem worth the effort for perfect.

And, for a while, I decided to be unlovable was OK because being flawed meant I stopped looking for flaws everywhere, I became less of an asshat, I actually started to like myself more, and the journey began to get interesting.

Some days, I wish my story could be told in big, bold Broadway musical numbers. In reality, when we allow for the small moments in our lives to speak to us, we can find beautiful truths.

Failing calculus didn’t kill me.

Writing an imperfect blog won’t kill me.

Trying something new probably won’t kill me either.