Autumn McDonald: Failure and Traveling
Benjamin Franklin famously said that the only things certain in life are death and taxes, but I’d like to amend this. The only things certain in life are death, taxes, and failure. This might be a bleak outlook on life to most people, but not for me.
Studying abroad has changed my outlook on failure and influenced the way I interact with the infamous “imposter syndrome” that so many Honors College students are plagued by. Before participating in study abroad, I was a straight A student with a perfect GPA and the president of a club. I had a wonderful job at the library that I loved, and honestly I was pretty content with that. I looked for opportunities to get involved with my community and opportunities to continue excelling academically, but I refused to take any risk. If I didn’t think I would excel at something during my first attempt, I wouldn’t do it. Why bother tarnishing my otherwise perfect record?
While I studied abroad, I failed at a lot of things, and I failed very often.
Quantifying my experience was a problem throughout my trip. There were many areas of this experience that I tried to boil down to either a success or a failure and the honest reality is: most of life is not a success or a failure and I shouldn’t have been acting like it was. I would love to tell a story about how I visited every museum and traveled around from sun-up to sun-down and left no stone unturned in my wake, but this wasn’t my experience. Traveling is always a struggle, and one absolutely worth having. There was one instance where, for about a week towards the end of November, I struggled to do anything outside of going to classes.
I felt lazy and like I was a wasted opportunity for study abroad. Back at my home university, I heard about how people had visited so many countries while they were abroad or how they visited museums that were once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, or backpacked through mountains while conducting research, and yet here I was, struggling to do anything outside of the bare minimum for an entire week. I didn’t have homework to do. I didn’t even have classwork assignments to turn in. It was humiliating and humbling to realize that I was a human being and would struggle with adjusting to a new country perfectly, and that I wouldn’t be able to have the same kind of experience that I heard about so often back home. I realize now that if I had the same kind of experiences as the ones I heard about, then there wouldn't have been any point in going at all.
Eventually, I had enough of myself and my moping. I pulled myself out of bed (around noon), put on a very baggy hoodie, baggy jeans, and converse with holes in the side. Basically, any clean clothes within reach, I grabbed in my first five seconds of being awake, and frantically shoved myself out of the house. I didn’t think about where I was going which I normally would. I didn’t think about the clothes that I was wearing that didn’t really fit for the weather. I was anxious and outside of my comfort zone.
There are a million lies I would love to tell about this particular trip out of the house. I would love to say that it was the turning point for me like in all of the great coming of age stories. I would love to say I spontaneously went to Italy or France and that I loved every minute of it. But this wasn’t a scene in a movie (and I doubt it will ever be). In November, in the U.K. it's cold and wet and dark at two p.m.. I was freezing and slipping on mud as I went into town and I had no clue what to do once I got there, but I did wander into the perfect part of town: the part with the art museum.
It was here that I realized it was okay to not think everything through or plan things perfectly. I got to see the Winchester Art Museum and while it's not Italy or France, it did give me the opportunity to take a minute, collect myself, and recognize that failure is kind of a decision we make. I decided to get up and do something, and while I didn’t accomplish what I wanted to, I did do something that ended up being important to me. While I failed to achieve some great, groundbreaking success in English, I did get to see some gorgeous art.
Poetically enough, the painting that helped shift my view of failure was a faceless self portrait by Graceland London called “There Is Only You.” I won’t lie to you, I had to look up the name of it because I didn’t see it while I was there; I was too focused on the painting. It was brightly colored and vibrant; something that was easy to look at, but the longer I looked the more I saw. It could be commenting on politics, but I was in a personal place and so I took it personally. The woman in the painting is sitting at a chess board with pills spilled out in front of her and the world in a champagne glass at her side. Her hand is holding a polar bear on the chess board, and someone (with what looks like blood on their hand) reaches out and grabs her hand.
I’m not sure if this is supposed to be an inspiring painting or not, but it made me consider myself and my actions in a new way. Tragically, I don’t have an inspiring story to tell. I’m still a person, and I still struggle. But in that moment, it finally clicked that failure was a decision I had to make actively. Nobody was going to stop me from doing anything (like the hand in the painting did), but nobody was going to make me do anything either. “There Is Only You” was kind of a perfect title for the moment I was in; there was only me in the U.K. and I had to be the one doing things and making decisions actively. Passivity wasn't an option.
As mentioned, my entire time in university I had only made A’s and leaving my semester at Winchester I had only one A, two B’s, and a single horrifying C. My GPA instantly lowered and my record was no longer perfect and admittedly a part of myself felt damaged. Upon coming home, I was embarrassed and still felt like a failure.
I’ve thankfully had some time to reflect and I’m grateful for this failure. I have the opportunity to continue to grow and learn, but I also now realize how important some aspects of life are to me. This lesson has helped me learn about myself and grow in ways I don’t think I would have without study abroad.
I had the chance to grow personally and recognize that being a person is more complicated than grades and that growing in a personal way isn’t necessarily quantifiable or something that can clearly be labeled as a success or failure. These self-perceived failures didn’t change anything about the way other people saw me and they didn’t mean that I was a failure either. I was (and am) learning that the decisions we make actively are the important and defining moments that make us who we are.
Autumn McDonald is an English major with an emphasis on professional writing. She participated in Lander University’s study abroad program in fall 2024 where she studied in the United Kingdom. She is expected to graduate in May 2026 and plans to continue her education by attending a Master’s degree program in library sciences.