Leisa Michelle

Nerdy Monologues of an Autodidact

A Good Ol’ “I Almost Died” Kind of Failure

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Spoiler alert: You’re most likely to experience failure when you try something new. I fell a lot over the weekend. I went left instead of right, backward instead of forward. I even almost died. Outlined below are the failures that came out of my first-ever ski trip…

…with an emphasis on the “almost-dying” part.

I went skiing for the first time last weekend in Spytkowice, Poland. I was super excited to not just try out skiing, but also to see the Polish countryside and not speak English. It was a great trip overall. I had a lot of fun, learned a lot of new Polish expressions, and made some new friends. I also almost had a run in with the Grim Reaper himself. For real.

You see, being from Florida, snow is new to me. The dynamics and physics of snow + skis was completely foreign. I couldn’t figure out how to control my movements. The instructor tried to help me, but well, I just couldn’t be helped. While my two other “first time skiing” friends (those bastards knew how to ski — I swear they must have had Olympic medals stuffed in their luggage…) drifted across the snow gracefully, I was trying my hardest to inch forward and not slide backward. I started to feel bad that I seemed to be holding everyone back. I tried to just mentally convince myself that I was an Olympic-grade skier, a pure-bred polar bear, Queen Elsa of Arendelle. But that only seemed to make it worse. Keep reading…

Now Look for Someone to Love

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You have buried someone you loved. Now look for someone to love. It is better to make good the loss of a friend than to cry over him.

-Letters from a Stoic, Seneca

Who was Seneca?

Seneca was a philosopher, statesman, and orator who was born in 4 BCE and died in 65 CE. He was an advisor to Emperor Nero, until accused of being a part of an assassination attempt on Nero’s life, and thus was ordered to commit suicide. During the course of his life, Seneca wrote several treatises and tragedies and hundreds of letters. He made a lot of important contributions to Stoicism, a school of philosophy that is usually described as a way of life. The Stoics were concerned mostly with actively and intentionally living virtuous lives. Philosophy wasn’t purely a collection of thoughts and theories, or even a mindset. For the Stoics, philosophy was actionable and applicable to everyday life; it was a lifestyle.

Now look for someone to love…

When we lose a friend — maybe due to the passing of time, the misalignment of values, or even a sudden visit from Death himself — it creates a void in our life. We don’t just have to come to terms with not being able to connect with our lost friend, we have to find a new thing to love in his place. We have to find someone or something worthy to replace him. Because we have not lost just a friend, but the object of our affections.

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That Time I Got a C in Calculus

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Failure is often relative and subjective. What I see as a devastating shortcoming might not seem that devastating to you. And hidden somewhere in that truth, there’s something to be said about failure itself being all in our heads. But I’m not going to explore that today. Instead I’m going to talk about the time I got a C in calculus.

I grew up a typical, goody-two-shoes, butt-kissing, overachiever. I had straight A’s my whole life up until college. I aced all my tests, destroyed all my standardized exams, everything. And when I got to uni, overachieving got to be a bit tougher, but I still managed to do really well in my classes. With the exception of my calculus class, that is.

On my first calc test I got a 68%, which was really hard to come to terms with at first because the entire test was just a review of everything you should know before you start calculus.
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Lessons Learned from a Failed Relationship: Embracing Fear

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It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment, or the courage, to pay the price…. One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover, and yet demand no easy return of love. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.

-The Shoes of the Fisherman, Morris West

Welcoming rejection in my home

At the very start of this relationship, before I had even admitted my feelings for the guy I liked, I was gripped with a fear of rejection. I was afraid that he wouldn’t feel the same way. And I know I’m not special in this. Everyone feels this sort of anxiety when they realize they like someone. It’s often disorienting, stressful, makes you want to bury your head in the sand and hide there forever and ever. But after days of feeling literally sick to my stomach, I decided enough was enough. I sat down in a quiet room and welcomed rejection into my home. That’s right, I welcomed him in my home.

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I’m Not Original

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This article won’t be for everyone. It’s for those of you whose Resistance keeps you quiet when you ought to raise your voice and let out a battle cry.

Everyone has come across those quotes that insist that nothing is original and everything novel has already been said or done. At some point in my life I managed to internalize this and take it a step further. I was crushed by thinking, “Nothing I think really matters.”

I’m sure I wasn’t alone in drawing this conclusion. And yet despite this hopeless thought, some of us are eager and hold on, searching for a moment when we’ll finally have a novel idea to express. Others surge into the swamp of self-doubt. But regardless of which group we find ourselves in, this is silly. Be they novel or not, popular or unpopular, our thoughts should be expressed loudly and shamelessly. Originality isn’t the goal: the expression of the unexpressed is.

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