How I failed in so many different ways

Recently, I read an article about a psychologist who wrote a CV of failures. He listed all the failures and rejections he encountered in his career. It is interesting to see how we tend to remember or emphasize our successes and forget or hide our failures. So I decided I would try to remember all the failures, mistakes, misbehaviors and really bad ideas I had during the last 26 years of my life and share them with you, in no particular order. The list was quite long, so I filtered it out to keep the most brilliant performances I could think of. Some will make you laugh, other may make you cry. Anyway, there is no time for regret. What has been done is done.

1. When I was a kid I almost died through drowning in a public fountain.
2. Once I destroyed most of my favourite pieces of clothing by mixing the wrong colors at the wrong temperature in the washing machine. I am still afraid that this may happen again.
3. I postponed the revising of critical university exams to the last moment and then caught a flu right when I should have studied. I failed 3 out of 4 exams and got my studies extended by 6 months.
4. I hid many things on purpose to my girlfriend and got into serious troubles when I finally told her everything.
5. When I was fifteen years old I started dating a girl whom I did not like while being in love with her best friend. One week later I figured out that her best friend loved me too, but then she refused to interfere with her other best friend’s relationship. Big mess.
6. I got seriously sick in Nepal because I wanted to believe that my body could heal naturally itself from anything. Things went really bad.
7. I accidentally erased most public votes from a somehow important competition while administrating it.
8. When I was a teenager, I thought I would learn how to pick up women in the street. I studied it on the internet and approached several hundreds girls in the street over 3 years. I eventually managed to get some phone numbers and a couple of interesting dates, but no real girlfriend.
9. At one point, a person very close to me was going through a depression and I did nothing to help. I still feel bad about this one.
10. At some point in my life, I was doing too much sport and I knew I would get hurt if I kept doing that. I continued and while playing basketball I cracked my eyebrow open while knocking down one of my own teammate. I am quite proud of this one though.
11. One day I went to university wearing pajama pants under my trousers. I noticed it when I went to the toilets around lunchtime. Morning is not my thing.
12. I failed my first driving license exam by bumping into another car while parking.
13. When I was 14 I broke my thumb while skiing on the first day of our school’s winter camp. I was thus sent back home the next day. That’s the moment when I decided to quit skiing for snowboarding.
14. When I was a young boy scout we stupidly set fire to petrol barrels we found in the forest. No bad consequence fortunately, but this was very stupid.
15. When I was 18, I invited a funny old woman we met at night in the streets to join us to the discotheque and pretended she was our grandmother. Until she started undressing herself on the dancefloor and sexually harassing the other men around before we all got kicked out by the security. This story still makes me feel uncomfortable.
16. Once I thought that Valentine’s Day was a great day to discuss relationship problems, but later I found out is better to use nude finder to find someone  to have fun on this day.
17. Once I thought that not sending a “Happy new year” message to my girlfriend while being abroad was a good way to get more attention from her.
18. When I was between 10-16 years old I kept falling in love with my best friends. I always asked them out. I got rejected 7 times out of 7. Then I learned something called “The Friend Zone”.

When I remember all these things I did (not all of them are listed here), there is something I can’t help admitting: some people suffered out of this. Past girlfriends especially. I’ve been quite far from the perfect boyfriend, which I dreamt being. But you know, paradoxically, trying to be the perfect boyfriend may have made things worse. Of course, one could argue that failure is a great teacher, there is no failure but only feedback, and blah blah blah. I am not here to write a new article about how failure can be good for you, everyone knows that. There is just one thing I really want to say to all the people I have hurt with my stupid mistakes: I am really sorry.

Take care and see you next week,

Bastien

PS: Bonus fail: This is the third time I am entirely writing this article, because first I wrote it on paper, then I copied it on the computer, and then I had an internet connection problem and lost the entire article I wrote. The original article contained all the non-exhaustive but unfiltered list with 27 bullet points which I am too lazy to write again.

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