Holiday Hurt

Christmas, a time for festive gathering and joyous occasions.. unless you've just failed again. With the end of the year and holidays on their way, I was hoping to enjoy some peaceful time, but I failed another competition. Now this doesn’t necessarily ruin the peace, but failure doesn’t help.

To elaborate on failure, it wasn’t that I did slightly bad in this competition. My failure wasn't being unable to solve just 1 or 2 problems. Even after 4 complete hours, I couldn’t solve any of the problems. After almost a year of preparing, I hoped for much better results. All the effort and time I had put into this competition seemed pointless. This pointlessness adds a further sting to the pain of failure and my holiday hurt.

Failing like this definitely puts a different flavor to the suggested happiness of the holidays. Although I know that mere competitions don’t have significant weightage in the grand scheme, in the days immediately following it's difficult to overlook the relative insignificance. Pain often blinds the mind.

In almost every way my failure feels negative, but I’m sure that this is what was best for me. I may not see right now, but eventually, way past these holidays, I’ll be able to look back with a clearer perspective.