A few months back, I wrote the entrance examination for medical university courses: The “numerus clausus”. Before and even after writing one of the biggest tests of my life, everybody, and I really mean EVERYBODY was saying “you’ll make it!” or “no doubt that someone like you passes that exam”; always reassuring me.
THEN came the email. The one that changed the following year:

Decision regarding your University Admission

We are sorry to inform you that you fucked up:))

Four points. Only four points were missing in order to fulfill my dream. Dr. med. Acharya. I was devastated. Failure wasn’t an option in my head. Adding to my pain, I had never failed before in my life. Somehow things had always been playing out in my favour. For the first time ever, fate must have been thinking “fuck you”. With profound effects. My whole life was pushed back one year. I was forced to take a gap year. In hindsight, that was needed. At the time, I didn’t really believe that.

that’s just human behaviour

Here’s the thing though. Nobody was lying to me. It isn’t somebody else’s fault of my feeling the way I felt. My parents, my friends, my teachers, and the fifty other people who somehow knew about my future plans. They all meant it. When someone you care about is visibly stressed and worried, you reach for the fastest painkiller you can offer, which is “you’ll make it”. This one-liner is quick, easy, and warm. That’s just human behaviour.
What nobody does, and I didn’t either (except for my lovely parents), is ask the actual logical question: “And what if it doesn’t?” It seems like doubt. It sounds like you’re betting against that person. Instead, you swallow it and say nice things. The possibility of failure moves into a drawer nobody opens. I helped push that drawer further inside; I never considered failing, so the email felt less like bad news and more like a glitch in reality.

that’s also human behaviour

Failing triggers its own set of reflexes, and I had all of them. I wanted to hide it. I didn’t let myself feel and process what had actually happened. I often caught myself saying “it’s not that deep” to people, when it actually mattered very much. It IS that deep or at least it would have felt that way, had I been honest with myself and others.
None of this is weird, or unexpected because of the world we live in. It’s what people do when something they never prepared for happens to them. That’s exactly the reason why such events should not stay unspoken. This silence is what makes the next person fall even harder; The aforementioned reflexes must be vanquished.

“what if i fail?”

The answer isn’t to stop encouraging each other. “You’ll make it” is a good thing to hear and I’d still want to hear it from a friend tomorrow. But that’s only one side of the story that deals with the feeling. The other side deals with life: “What if you fail?”
Asking it isn’t pessimism or doubt. It’s what lets you fully commit to plan A, without being stressed because plan B exists somewhere and you roughly know what it looks like. Even if you have a second plan, the failure hits with the same force, but you recover a lot faster.

both please (!!)

Say “you’ll make it.” It’s kind and often true. But then ask the second question as well: “and if not, then what?”


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