Failure as an option: Why is it okay to drop out of college?

Posted by Emily on August 15th, 2018

I remember her call well. It was a Sunday evening. Shortly after 21 o'clock. I just came out of the shower when I heard the sound. Quickly I wrapped a towel around my waist and ran soaking wet to the living room table, where the phone vibrated in front of him. When I picked up the phone, I did not hear anything at first. Then a soft sob.

"Who is it?" I asked irritated.

"I," said someone whose voice sounded familiar to me. My brain made a lightning-quick vote adjustment. "Is that you, Lisa?"

"Yes," she breathed.

"What happened?" I asked worriedly.

She was silent for a moment, breathing so hard that I could hear it through the phone line. Then she began to talk about her last months.

From dream study to nightmare study

She told me how she started her psychology studies two years ago full of anticipation and how happy she was to have found her "dream study". She reported on the first lectures, the first exams and how her "dream study" slowly but surely turned into a "nightmare study". It began with her becoming more and more indifferent to the lectures and preferring to listen to her own poems instead of professors. Soon after, she stopped doing important exercises and preparation tasks. Their self-motivation became ever smaller. So small that at some point she could not even ask herself to go to the lectures. And if she ever went because of her bad conscience, she felt like a stuffy pensioner couple on Ballermann 6: completely out of place. She lost herself in a downward spiral of self-imposed pressure, lack of interest and poor grades. The spiral turned down until she could not stand anymore. It was a Sunday night, just after 9pm, when the pressure became too heavy and she decided to call me.

We talked for almost two hours. Until she realized that she needed to change her situation - she had to drop out of college. That was the only sensible solution. A solution that she had known for months, but had always repressed. She described it to two males on the phone: "It's like two little males sitting on my shoulders. The male on the right shoulder wants me to go through the study in any case, come what may. The other male on the left shoulder tries to persuade me to give up. So far, the male on the right shoulder has been getting stronger. "

But eventually the male on the left shoulder won. Lisa dropped out of college.

A strange inner opponent

"It was the best decision I could have made," she told me a few days ago when I met her for dinner. She seemed to be dealing with it quite casually, having broken off. It looked quite different a few months earlier. "I failed!", She wrote me at that time via WhatsApp. She had already survived five semesters of psychology at that time. It was only a few steps to the end. But Lisa threw it down.

"There was no other way," she said. "I put so much pressure on myself that I got in the way. I had some real panic attacks: I was out of breath, it was black in front of my eyes. For three months I was under stress. I went to bed with a stomachache and got up again. "

The story that reflects Lisa is not one of those countless success stories we see in our social media news feeds every day. Lisa is the opposite of all the heroic start-up founders, career high flyers and generally all the outrageously successful people who never seem to have a setback and make us believe that life is all about success. Lisa is the anti-success. She failed. She gave up. And that's fine. Because what hardly anyone says: It is okay to fail. It's okay to be single again, to study at an unknown university in Saarland and to downgrade from Strategic International Management to normal business administration. We just have to admit it.

Every year more than 25 percent of all students drop out of college and many more think about it, but in the end they do not pull it off. They are afraid to stand as losers. Fear of not conforming to the social notion of having reached certain things to a certain age. Because let's be honest: There may never been a generation that had such a strong urge to follow a specific timeline. Maybe that's because of the desire for stability in a world where everything is getting more and more chaotic. Or maybe the career advocates who hammer us in, that you should not have any gaps in your CV. Either way, it's a strange inner adversary that grows with every birthday; it's what scientists call our "chronological age," the timeline of our lives.

What is planned, must be done

In the generation of our parents, five major milestones defined adulthood: graduation, first home, financial independence, marriage and the first child. Our generation is also going through these milestones, but on average about five years later. And although the age for marrying or having children has shifted backwards, there is still the belief that there is a real age for these milestones. Some of my friends are very specific about this "right age".

Like Lisa.

During our dinner, she told me that after completing her studies she had thought of one thing above all else: her timeline.

"At the beginning of my twenties, I made an exact plan of how my life would be until my 30th birthday. At the age of 21, I wanted to have my bachelor's degree, travel to South America for half a year, start my master's at 22, work as a child psychologist at the age of 27, move in with my boyfriend at age 28, marry at age 29, and my first child at the age of 30 get it, "she said.

"Oha," I replied, giving her a startled look.

Lisa immediately intervened when she saw my eyes. "Yeah, I know, it sounds a bit crazy to plan your life so well, but I also know that I'm not the only one who says, 'I'll marry at 30 and have my first child at 31' , I know many other girls who have a similar plan in mind. "

When I listened to Lisa's story, I realized why she had called me that Sunday night. She was so focused on achieving her plan that a world collapsed and try this web-site when she realized she would not realize it.

Anyone who fixes on the achievement of certain milestones automatically has the feeling that they can not afford an agreement on the planned path - and gets considerable argumentation problems with himself if he wants to give something up.

The best plan for our twenties

In the book, pack your own backpack! There is a wonderful quote from the Roman philosopher Seneca: "How stupid it is to make plans for the whole life, since we are not even masters of tomorrow."

When I first read it, it reminded me of Lisa and that plans are often no more than the illusion of a perfect life. But life is not perfect. Unexpected things happen. People go. Ideas fail. Diseases are coming. So I believe that in our twenties it's not about living the way we intended, but about adapting when things go wrong. The best plan we can make in our twenties is the plan to keep making new plans.

"My journalism studies begin next week. Keep your fingers crossed that it works, "Lisa told me as we said goodbye to our meal. A fine smile played around her lips. She seemed content with herself, somehow freed.

I remembered our phone call and how things sometimes turn out. 'Maybe we should just trust life more often, instead of trying to control everything,' I thought, watching Lisa go down until her silhouette slowly dipped below the horizon. The air was clear and the sky shone in a dark orange.

It was a Sunday evening, shortly after 9pm.

I ran home and could almost smell the summer.