“What have I learned from this fall that I can take with me as I begin again?” asks Brené Brown, an important question I’ve been pondering a lot of late. Not passing my Nonprofit Cloud Consultant exam this weekend was hard, but it comes on the heels of a lot of hard moments over the last 22 months. Changing my life is hard, and accepting setbacks like failing an exam is part of that.
Failing is just a moment in time: it’s what I do next that really matters. So here’s what the last 48ish hours have looked like for me:
- After leaving the testing centre, I keyed up my “I Can Do This” playlist and sang along, loudly, as I drove to and from a variety of stores to complete errands.
- I bought and ate lunch as I’d planned – no binging on junk food to numb the pain, no skipping lunch to punish myself for failing. I also hit my step goal (and then some) because walking helps me processes emotions in a healthy way.
- I caught up on all the episodes of #StarTrek that I’d missed while studying and got all excited about new #DoctorWho episodes.
- I used Daryl Moon’s handy list to plan my next steps for passing this exam.
So here I am, beginning again (and again, and again, as Grace Paley once wrote). But I’m not starting from scratch. Failing an exam doesn’t erase all that I’ve learned to date. I’ll keep building on that knowledge until I am ready to write it again, and I will pass it – maybe not right away, but sometime in the not so distant future. So what I learned from this fall is that it’s alright to fall if you pick yourself back up, feel what you need to feel, and carry on. Allons-y!