Dealing with Disappointment

About half a year ago, I had started an application to my dream school, I knew the chances were slim but I was determined to set that aside and try my best. I went to almost every Zoom webinar and was encouraged by my friends, family, former teachers coaches, and even staff at this school. I worked on it for 8 months and when the deadline came around, I started counting the days until the decision. Then I was counting the hours. Then I was counting the minutes.

I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before, all night I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I had a good feeling but also good anxiety – it’s the best way I could describe it – and my heart had butterflies and my stomach was in knots. I wanted to vomit; time was creeping too slowly but also not slow enough. I really thought that I had maybe just maybe made it and that I would have gotten a package in the mail that would have been at the school hours ago.

Then it updated at exactly 8:31 a.m. and what I read broke my heart. Immediately I had started crying and I forced myself to read it out loud to myself and to my friends and family:

“The Admissions Committee has carefully considered your application for admission to (school)  and I am sorry”

That is all I saw before I had started to cry. All that work, all that build up, all that excitement and nerves to see those three words that meant I didn’t do it. I kept reading and then I read it over and over again. For some reason though, my mindset throughout this was really different than when I was waiting for different results though my life: I was thinking that I didn’t fail, I just didn’t get it this year.

I wasn’t thinking that I wasn’t good enough, but someone else was just better qualified than I was. They get thousands of applications worldwide each year and I have no idea how close or how far I was away from getting it. All I knew was that I had done my best and it wasn’t enough for that year and that I would just have to do better and try again. I cried all while realizing this, and then I got back to work because life goes on and this next time I could be better prepared.

So I’m trying again, but I’m happy for those who did get in because they deserve it and maybe next year I can join them if I work hard enough.

Have you ever been disappointed by something, or someone, important to you before? Have you been rejected or unable to get into something that you were passionate about? How did you feel at the time, and looking back, what would you have thought differently?