From time to time I hit a writer’s block here and fall silent. Especially when things are burbling around me that aren’t my stories to tell. Luckily, the internet provides many journaling prompts that I can lean on to help me out.
This prompt: How can you reframe one of your biggest regrets in life?? comes from a Reddit post. Reddit has everything!
During my freshman year in high school I took an advanced science class called Qualitative Physical Science. QPS for short. We knew going in that it was a difficult class but up until then I never had problems with school. It all came naturally (except memorizing the world explorers and what they discovered) until this class. No matter how hard I studied and how much I read, I ended my first marking period with a D. I NEVER had a D before and I felt like the biggest failure. I talked with the teacher, who kindly told me that a D was not failing and if I stuck with the class it would eventually click. He suggested a tutor, which yeah, no. Tutors cost money and I wasn’t about to ask my parents to spend money on a tutor. I believed with my whole heart that if I failed that class, my life would be ruined. So I dropped the class.
I regret it so much, because 1) I was moved into a much lower level science class that bored me to death, and 2) dropping that one class removed me from the pathway that all of my friends were on. They all moved on to Chemistry in 10th grade because that followed QPS, I was in Biology because that followed the Earth Science class I ended up in. Our schedules never aligned again.
What I needed was one more adult to say, “Stick with the class. Stick with the hard thing. If you fail, we will figure things out for you.”
I can reframe that to say: I was trusted to make my own educational decisions at fourteen years old. For good or for ill, I was allowed to do what I wanted. Or, I can reframe it to say: in the end, I have a great life *now*. Would one science class have changed my whole life’s trajectory THAT much? Probably not.
(It still grates though.)
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