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My life coach told me the best way to learn from mistakes is to hold on to them and never forget what they taught us. A week later, my roommate discovered the secret to time travel and founded his own company. I think it’s called Time is Money, Inc., though I’m not certain about that, so don’t quote me. Anyway, I decided to take advantage of my life coach’s advice with this new found discovery of time travel made by my roommate by reliving all my past failures. I know it doesn’t seem super intuitive. I guess most people would probably like to either correct their past mistakes, or even relive their greatest accomplishments, like winning a spelling bee, or getting accepted into a prestigious grad school, or their first kiss with a high school sweetheart, or their first college party before the next day’s crippling hangover. But my life coach insisted that in order to better improve, it’s best to focus on what I did wrong in my life so I can ensure I don’t do it again and end up doing the right thing later.

The first thing I revisit was the third grade when I was learning the multiplication table. I could never really get it down all that well. But it happened at recess that school day. A bunch of my classmates were playing a game of ‘pelt the ball as hard as you can at anyone moving’. I never seemed to have the ball, but rather tried weaving in and of the jungle gym so as to not get hit. I even developed my own strategy of looking absolutely insane, giving off the impression that I had no idea what I was doing. But really, I knew. It was on this day that Mark Huilins threw the ball at me. He later said that he was aiming at my torso, though it happened that he had the dumb luck to hit me square in the temple. My head bounced off the ball, barely still attached to my spinal cord, and rammed into a metal pole of the jungle gym. I blacked out instantly. When I came to, a group of my peers surrounded me, and I felt a sticky sensation on the back of my head. My first concussion, and the entire class gathered to see if I died and came back. A couple of kids asked if I saw God. I wouldn’t know where I was another forty minutes or so.

The next memory I revisited happened to be a series of memories that shared the same theme: every time I got rejected, dumped, or heartbroken in some capacity. When I came up with the idea of revisiting those memories, I kinda didn’t think there would be so many. It came across as a blow to my ego, to say the least. My first crush, Samantha, happened to also be my neighbor. I used to watch her and her friends play hide-and-seek in their front yard. I usually went outside to play basketball in the hopes that she would see me and, I dunno, swoon, pine, or do anything other than ignore my existence. I found out sometime that semester from a friend of mine that happened to date a friend of hers, that she didn’t reciprocate.

Of course there was also Sari, the girl that liked me driving her all over town when I got my license, but only wanted to go where her boyfriend happened to be at. I even somehow got duped into driving them to prom, in which they both spent the night getting drunk, feeling each other up, and puking on my backseat.

Then there was Debra, whom I believed would have been the love of my life, if it hadn’t been for her getting into Florida State and moving within the year. 

I spent my college years falling in and out of love every time I walked through the quad, or stood in the mess hall, or went into the registration office to sign up for next semester’s classes. Somehow, despite the messy love life that defined my collegiate romances, I tripped upon a woman by the name of Judith. Judith, who went by Jude, with two tattoos on her arm, one of a blue jay and the other a wreath to commemorate her mother, enjoyed hanging out with stray cats that we secretly believed the administration released back in the seventies as a way to ensure pesky rodents didn’t wonder onto campus for too long. Jude dressed like a hippy most of the time, and she was shy and had a hard time making friends. But we enjoyed talking for hours on end, all through the night, about anything. I really didn’t care about the topic, or how tired I knew I would be the next day in class, just so long as I got to spend time with Jude. Then, before I knew it, we had graduated college, ended up dating for over seven years, and I felt as if she might be the one. I convinced myself that she was the one. But, just like with the multiplication table, I happened to miscalculate one too many integers, and ended at the wrong conclusion because I couldn’t understand what was going on.

The rest of my love life followed a similar pattern of embarrassment, rejection after rejection, and years spent by myself.

A majority of the rest of my failures had a lot to do with my career and professional life. You know, a lot of my classmates knew exactly what they wanted to be when they went into college. They even had a five year plan. I barely even had a five minute plan. I couldn’t tell you what I wanted to do then, much less now. And maybe that’s why I sort of jumped back and forth from one job to the next, before settling on wanting to become a journalist because a girlfriend of mine at the time got really political when she got drunk and spouted off about how brave it is to work a job in which the head of our government would hate you. Though I think she mostly had a crush on Hunter S. Thompson, and fell in love with the romance of his stories.

I revisited all the times in which I received a rejection letter from a journalist school. One of those rejection letters even convinced my girlfriend at the time to leave me because she believed I was too much of a failure to waste her time on. 

I’m not entirely sure if I really got anything out of the exercise of revisiting all my past failures and miseries. It certainly killed an afternoon I could have spent cleaning out my garage, writing the next great American novel, or finally finding a career so I didn’t have to live off of friends’ couches.