I got my results today. They came in the post, in an innocuous white envelope.

I’d almost given up on them ever arriving. It’s been over a month since the exams. A long kind of month. A month with christmas and travel and parties and illness. I have no idea how I got through the long summers waiting for GCSE, AS or A level results to come out. That took 3 months.

Anyway.

The news is that I passed.

All three of the exams.

Just.

I scraped 2 passes, one of them 0.75 % over the pass mark, one 3%, and just about struggled through the third with a grand total of 68%.

I was peeved last time round, when I ‘only’ got around 75% average. This time, I have about 57%.

57 is a pass. I could be happy.

But I’m not.

I wanted to do well, really well, so I could cancel out the less-than-perfect grades I got in summer.

I don’t think I’m stupid. I don’t want to be anyway. And I don’t like giving up. But I’m not sure how I’m going to make the next exams go well enough to drag these grades up to somewhere I feel comfortable celebrating.

I’m also a bit stuck on how to act now. I passed, which tends to encourage people to congratulate one, but I don’t feel happy to have passed. Probably because I know I didn’t put in as much effort as I could have done. I don’t know, even with the benefit of hindsight, exactly what I should have done differently, given my time constraints and the ‘extracurricular activities’ I engage in, but I am sure it must be possible. I suppose I could have read more during my commute, re-read my notes and the textbooks before each new lecture.. not bought new fish, or worked on the book.

I am trying to tell myself that I did ok, considering. But I don’t believe myself. I don’t believe anyone else if they say it either.

I don’t deal well with failure, even if it’s only failure in my head. I had dreams of being good at what I do, and being brought back to the real world hurts. It shouldn’t. But it does.

I sat through almost 200 hours of lessons, gave up lots of lie-ins and otherwise-free-evenings, took a week’s holiday to sit in school and used another 10 days of what should have been a holiday to revise on the beach, and it still isn’t ‘good enough’.

Good enough for whom or for what isn’t clear. Even to me. 

I don’t know who’s keeping score. I’m not aware of anyone frowning down at me. I’m paying for the course myself, so it’s not as if I’m letting a sponsor down.
And yet… *sighs*

I’ve been told nobody cares about grades. Problem is, I do. Even though I know they’re just numbers, just hoops other people hold up for you to jump through. Despite all the head-y knowledge-y thoughts that none of it really matters, I am disappointed.

I could have done better. I should have done better.

 “Could do better” is something lots of people quote from old school reports. I didn’t often get comments like that. I did well. I was ‘conscientious’ and ‘diligent’. I passed exams, I functioned and I achieved. I wasn’t always the best (academically), but I was occasionally, and when I wasn’t, I wasn’t far behind.

I don’t know how to deal with not being good. I don’t even know how to function when I ‘fail’. Not that these results are even real fails. At least when I failed the practical part of my Meister exam I could resit and pass properly the second time round. Scraping through, when it didn’t feel like it should be such a struggle is just frustrating.

In theory I should stand up, brush myself off, tell myself it’s experience, and get my head down for the next round. Instead, I’m wallowing,  writing this when I should be sleeping, defeating myself before I even begin. Tomorrow I will be unable to fully concentrate on whatever new content we get presented with and be too tired to review it when I get home.

I need to get a new mindset if I’m to stand any chance of not going crazy between now and September.

Anyone got any ideas where they’re sold? Not that I have any money to buy one. Anyone got any ideas where they’re giving them away?