Thinking about myself more recently...and I've noticed that, even though I've thought I was afraid of failure since, well, forever, it really spiked starting around fifth grade.
I was taking an online math course, pre-algebra, in conjunction with the math class i was taking in school. Because school was boring and I needed at least one area where I could say I was learning something. As a consequence, I was even more bored when I was in school.
My teacher gave us like sixty problems a night on the same concept, and sometimes she'd assign the same lesson multiple nights in a row to make sure we got it. I got so bored in her class that I stopped caring completely. And so my grades started slipping.
Every time I got a grade below a 95, my dad would yell at me. Meaning he'd yell at me at least once a week thanks to worksheets, homework assignments, tests, and quizzes. They weren't that bad. I had an 80-something average, and I did well enough to scrape it up to a 90 or so by the end of each quarter.
But he'd yell at me anyway. Saying that I should be getting 100s on all this material, how I'd already learned it, etc. And whenever I didn't understand a concept on my online math course, or struggled a little (especially before the pre-algebra course. they didn't really teach the concepts very well before then. or maybe it was just the program i used to do 6th grade math. it was a different program than pre-algebra and algebra). He'd yell at me.
I think he was just frustrated. My mom and my brother always promised me that he was, too. Even he did. But I felt then, and I still do, a little, that he was yelling at me because I was a failure.
Fifth grade was a rough period in my life. I was so used to being a failure in everyone else's eyes that I just assumed my dad thought I was a failure, too.
And now I'm afraid of failure and I'm a perfectionist. I want to let it go but I can't. I could take the easy way out and blame my dad, but I can't. That would be wrong. I brought this on myself. He just sped it along. It's not his fault.
But why do I sometimes feel like it is?
I was taking an online math course, pre-algebra, in conjunction with the math class i was taking in school. Because school was boring and I needed at least one area where I could say I was learning something. As a consequence, I was even more bored when I was in school.
My teacher gave us like sixty problems a night on the same concept, and sometimes she'd assign the same lesson multiple nights in a row to make sure we got it. I got so bored in her class that I stopped caring completely. And so my grades started slipping.
Every time I got a grade below a 95, my dad would yell at me. Meaning he'd yell at me at least once a week thanks to worksheets, homework assignments, tests, and quizzes. They weren't that bad. I had an 80-something average, and I did well enough to scrape it up to a 90 or so by the end of each quarter.
But he'd yell at me anyway. Saying that I should be getting 100s on all this material, how I'd already learned it, etc. And whenever I didn't understand a concept on my online math course, or struggled a little (especially before the pre-algebra course. they didn't really teach the concepts very well before then. or maybe it was just the program i used to do 6th grade math. it was a different program than pre-algebra and algebra). He'd yell at me.
I think he was just frustrated. My mom and my brother always promised me that he was, too. Even he did. But I felt then, and I still do, a little, that he was yelling at me because I was a failure.
Fifth grade was a rough period in my life. I was so used to being a failure in everyone else's eyes that I just assumed my dad thought I was a failure, too.
And now I'm afraid of failure and I'm a perfectionist. I want to let it go but I can't. I could take the easy way out and blame my dad, but I can't. That would be wrong. I brought this on myself. He just sped it along. It's not his fault.
But why do I sometimes feel like it is?
