Everyone experiences failure at some point in life, and everyone handles it differently. In the past, I have not dealt with my failure in a productive way. I have responded with anger, frustration, and giving up. When I find things hard I lose motivation and think I am not good enough or that I’m incapable of the work given to me. This is the life of having a fixed mindset, and working towards having a better growth mindset. I believe people may have a fixed mindset but also have growth mindset qualities that they do not know how to work through correctly.

A big problem for me was when I had to face addiction. I say had but really it is something I have to face every day. How I see this fall into the line of failure is that I had to try to pull myself out every time but I would fail by relapsing. In my opinion, without failure, it truly makes it hard to right your wrongs. I would argue that the world would be a total mess if nothing was considered a failure and everyone continued their wrong actions.

When I was a child I was adopted by “The Henry Family.” They had told me my birth parents were addicted to drugs and that I am more likely to get addicted a lot faster than others. I knew they were right but I always had to learn things the hard way. This has been a struggle my whole life. If someone explains that the stove is hot, my reaction is to find out for myself. I didn’t fully believe trying Xanax would lead me down a terrible path of addiction, and neither did I believe that with any other substances I’ve tried. That is when reality hit me in the face.

When I started going down this path my mindset changed with my knowledge about what addiction really was. I used to believe I was not addicted because I thought everything was a choice and I could stop whenever I wanted. This is true. I was able to stop when I wanted, but I was still addicted. When I would stop myself the feeling of wanting it again never went away. This might be confusing to some because if it hurt me so bad why would I still be wanting it? That is simply because of the benefits I got from these hurtful substances. The good does not outweigh the bad in this scenario, but the benefits I received are definitely missed.

Because I like to do things the hard way as I mentioned, I decided to end my cycle without any help. I am a stubborn person and I like things to go my way. I believe I can do anything by myself. Whether a person has this mindset or not does not mean getting help is going to hurt. On this day I am 21 days sober and it’s been the hardest yet. This is where I can challenge my thinking and go down a different path than what I have previously done. I am finally at a point where I am willing to better my life.