To all the honors and ap/IB burnout kids, this one’s for you. I have struggled with the idea of failure being a good opportunity my whole life. I feel like I am constantly in fear of failure, even though that leads me to have task paralysis and fail anyways. I was never set up to succeed and so I have a hard time taking the reins of my own life in order to beat the odds because I feel that I don’t deserve success. I have always been obsessed with perfection and being a ‘gold star’ student. I felt I never really achieved the level of intellectuality and time management that everyone else did in order to succeed as a student, so my grades were not valedictorian material, hence the shining gold F on my forehead.