I think it’s safe to assume that we all have complex relationships with failure. I’ve bombed some exams in my life; in fact, when I took my driving test, the administrator said, “Well, you might’ve pulled this off,” as we pulled back into the DMV parking lot. As I was waiting for her to tally my scores, I was so terrified of failing that it felt like my entire world was relying on it. In reality, my parents, who were sick of driving me around, were the only external party relying on it. But failure isn’t always cut-and-dry. Sometimes failure is a feeling, or a thought we have about ourselves, not some number with a clear cut-off metric. Failure can be difficult to define.

I’m a big definition person, though. Failure is difficult because that word can mean different things and carry different connotations depending upon who we are and what we have experienced. For many, failure is objective; it’s true or false. For others, it’s more nuanced and even successes can feel like failures. For the sake of this thought, I’m operating under the definition that failure is “not meeting real or perceived expectations.” As I already mentioned, some things have a clear metric, like exams. We either get a passing grade or an insufficient score. But is an insufficient score automatically a failure? Maybe you didn’t meet the “real” expectations — the number of correct questions to receive a passing score — but did you fail? For each opportunity, even ones with a clear metric, we have the ability to set our own perceived expectations. This helps us avoid personalizing what we perceive to be a failure.

Our brains like to make shortcuts and leaps in logic daily, some of which keep us safe, some of which keep us moving forward and some of which can unfortunately be unhelpful. Sometimes we can convince ourselves that failing an exam reflects on our character.

It can be helpful at times to evaluate those leaps in logic, to take a pause and allow ourselves to recognize success within our failures. That feeling of failure sometimes feels inevitable. Yet not succeeding, not meeting the metric, can also have its own benefits. Resilience, our ability to spring back into shape, can be strengthened as we are forced to bend — not like an oak tree that brute-forces its way through a storm until it snaps, but a palm tree that looks like it’s about to snap, bending with the wind until the minute the wind stops and it’s right back up again. Getting back up can only be learned after we’ve fallen.

Failure can cultivate a greater sense of empathy within us. We develop greater compassion for others around us and an appreciation for the strength of the human spirit. When someone comes to us in pain, we can only move past immediately jumping to the silver lining and “well, at least you’re alright” when we know what it would be like to hear that after our own failures.

Yes, in college and in life, a certain amount of failure is to be expected. You’ll nail some assignments; you’ll wish you’d done better on others. But I dare you to beg the question — if we can convince ourselves at times that even our successes are a failure, why can we not also remind ourselves that not meeting expectations can still carry with it personal successes and plentiful opportunities?