So, I failed again, in my examinations.

It was a fine Friday, March 03, a day, as usual, it could be. Now, I had been quite exhausted and stressed out for quite a few days and today was the day I finally could sleep peacefully after several days. I had some chores to do around the office administration and after completing those I arrived home at around 1:00 give or take a few minutes, I had my food and immediately fell on the bed after changing my clothes. Initially, I listened to some songs and after a while, as my eyes fell sleepy finally, my phone blinked a notification of battery low. I put my phone in charging and went back to bed, Surprisingly I was in a good day's sleep in no time.
Now, this may not feel like a milestone, but to me, it was a huge relief.
At around 4:15 I was woken up by a call to my phone from some Taiwanese number. I have been getting these quite frequently and on further searching, I discovered it was called a one-ring scam cbsnews.com/miami/news/are-you-getting-unex...
So, I just pick up my phone when it rings, but I don't call back.
After that, there were some notifications on my messenger that caught my interest. I usually don't have any of the apps allowed to send notifications, but recently I have been trying to make an effort to be more in line with reality so have started accepting notifications of nearly all work-related or messaging-related apps.
The notifications were from my classroom messenger group and our results for the 4th-semester examination that happened around 6 months back were published. Along with it was an attachment to the examination schedule of the 5th-semester examination which did make me a little relieved as it had been more than a month since we anticipated both.
Looking at the result, I was in utter disbelief, I don't know what I felt, I can't quite recall it, just that it was a very uneasy feeling.

I have previously failed in my 3rd-semester examinations and I didn't quite felt this way, perhaps because I was expecting to fail. I hadn't attempted a single question back then, but this time around, It was different.
I am usually not a get all those marks kind of guy, so I most of the time attempt questions that I know the answers to and evaluate my passing probability.
I was not expecting to fail this time around, especially with most of the subjects being familiar previously as well.

My sleepy mood was wearing off and I was beginning to wonder what failure is to overcome the shock of it. Perhaps, I misread myself in my mind. I didn't think that I have failed, I just thought I have failed in my examinations.
With a heart now on the heavier side of things, I opened my laptop for the first time today and began seeking answers to the question, What is failure?

I was not in the mood to use the laptop for a long time but just some video-watching made a few things click for me.
A relatively simple explanation defined it somewhere around the lines of "Not getting the outcome you desired or expected in a certain time frame or course of events".
While this definition is simple with no extravagance of meanings behind it, was simple and defined mine as a failure.

Now come on the usual stuff about taking failure as a path to success and even defining the pros of failure, However, none of that applied to my case. I can't possibly learn something new by failing in an examination except for maybe exploring some new realms of feelings or getting some introspection and no failing in my exams time and again doesn't make me strong.

Next played a video that defined failure as part of success, and as usual, came the suggestions of not giving up. I felt I was on the wrong track as I hadn't given up, I just wanted to validate what failure was and just take a brief moment of this feeling for some introspection time.
Now, I wasn't internally sad by the time and was more or less already recovered from my heavy-hearted state.
Although one thing did pique my interest from the video, it was a quote by someone as "The only thing that keeps us from getting what we want is the story we keep telling ourselves why we can't have it". It made me want to propose to her.

Slowly, I realized my question was never really what is failure. It was the side-effect of being unable to process why I failed.
Now came another impactful quote "We tend to define failure by the outcome rather than the effort".
This quote was great and I take the message it conveyed, however, it made me realize my situation in a slight variation.
While I was pretty sure that I would pass and still am thinking about getting those copies re-evaluated, it made me focus on my efforts for the examination.
Those were very minimal at best and honestly enough, I never really prepared for that examination, just went along with some of my pre-gathered knowledge on the subject matter.

While my quest on finding the meanings and depths behind failure didn't seem to fruitful, it did make me look back on my efforts than the action that I intended.
While the quote encourages oneself to not feel low by defining the efforts as a success even if the outcome is a grave failure,
I somehow have managed to fail in both the efforts and outcome, yet I am surprisingly calm.