The weight of perfection

As the calendar of 2026 hits May, the annual advanced Placement exams and final season begin to pile up students’ workload nationwide. Students are once again facing one of the most stressful periods of the academic year. The overwhelmed feeling brought by navigating through looming deadlines, maintaining high GPAs, extracurricular activities and late-night study sessions makes many both mentally and physically exhausted. May is my least favorite month. It is always a nonstop marathon of responsibilities. APs overlap with final exams and the effort that needs to be paid in order to manage different tasks easily drains one out. Peer pressure that comes along with these can be hard to handle. It is the psychological nature of us to feel down or stressed when everyone else progresses when we are struggling stagnantly. However, through talking with my advisor lately, I was encouraged by an atypical suggestion, at least for myself: to embrace imperfection. It was to my surprise when she cared about my sleep and meals recently before saying anything else when I spoke to her about my anxiety. I always felt extremely safe and natural with my advisor during our cycle meetings so I was endlessly complaining about how late I had to stay up every night and how tired I was for the entirety of many weeks giving up eating and

breaks preparing for tests and catching up with due dates. After rambling with a breathless stream of words for the fastest 10 minutes of my life, she took a deep breath, stared directly into my eyes, unexpectedly did not spare a single word mentioning any of my grades, and instead told me ‘Failing is ok.’ I grew up believing success was earned through diligence and sacrifice. From a young age, I shouldered responsibilities to chase achievements relentlessly and was fortunate enough to indeed earn some of them. I always knew that it was this kind of mentality that trapped me in pushing myself to my limits whenever I could, but that just felt normal to me, because it’s just what you have to do to build the future you wish to build. For the first time in a long while, I paused to consider and reflect my advisor’s words. The idea of failure always sounded catastrophic to me. Yet mirroring my past experiences right now, I figured out that the excessive pursuit of perfection was in fact a kind of fear of an unknown future. I wished to base my sense of security from gaining titles and proving that I was capable without realizing how productivity stopped being something I pursued, but an unbearable burden that manipulated my confidence. As tests continue to unfold, my mindset altered in the same situation as all of the past years. Performances do represent our abilities to a large extent. Yet there’s something even more essential: Sometimes our growth is not measured by how much we can endure, but by our tolerance to our imperfect selves, learning how to care for ourselves and truly understanding that our worth cannot be determined by numbers on sheets of transcripts. And that is the message that I adopted to face this years’ ‘nightmare month’ with inner calmness.