The Lowlight Reel: A Partial History of All My Losses, Failures and Soul Crushing Defeats (Updated)

1. When I was in 8th grade, I was going to do a rap at my friends birthday party. The moment came. The spotlight was on me. The track started. I started rapping. But then I got off beat and the whole thing fell apart. It was soul crushing. I lost. It sucked. 
2. I broke my wrist in the preseason my senior year in high school and didn't even get to play football that year. I lost. It sucked. 
3. After that, I tried out for the fall play and, although clearly the superior actor, I got the role of MacDuff, not MacBeth. This was partially because they had already promised it to this kid (who I helped coach for his audition) and also partially because I had an afro at the time and that was not what they wanted in a MacBeth in rural PA. I lost. It sucked. 
4. I got mono. I didn't rest enough and my spleen almost exploded. I was bedridden for a few weeks then went back to school, but was in a perpetual state of fatigue and brain fog. I then came down with the dreaded "chronic fatigue syndrome." I was sick and tired for like 18 months all in. I missed track season. I could barely make it through an entire day of school. That was my entire senior year of high school. I lost. It sucked.  
5. That spring, I made it to national championships in speech and debate but got knocked out in the quarter-finals. I lost. It sucked. 
6. I was going to start college at Cornell in the fall, but I was too sick to go off to school. So instead of going off to college in the fall, I stayed home in small town PA and worked in the men's suit department at JC Penney. I lost. It sucked. 
7. I went to college at Cornell. A buddy asked me if I wanted to play rugby. So I took up the game of rugby. It was great! I beat out a bunch of more senior players and won a starting spot as open-side flanker on the A squad. In the first couple matches, I played like an absolute beast. I was on top of the world. In the third match of the season, a bloodbath against Syracuse, I separated the AC joint in my shoulder while diving to make a tackle. Wound up in the hospital; complete separation of the AC joint; out for the season. I lost. It sucked.
8. So I'm studying at Cornell, but unfortunately I was too poor to stay there. Cornell was basically like, "Give us all your money. We don't care how poor you are. We don't care if you have no money. You owe us $2,000 more dollars and if you don't give it to us we will put you in collections." True story. Hell of a time. By the end of my sophomore year, I was done. I couldn't deal with it anymore. I dropped out of school and moved out to San Diego. That went south in a hurry and I wound up broke and sleeping in my car. I lost, yet again! It sucked. 
9. The weight of being poor; family problems; being a college dropout and worrying that I'd thrown my entire future away was a bit too much to bear. I was depressed (pretty reasonably so) and started having trouble sleeping. I can't say I lost because I eventually pulled through, but let me tell you, it really sucked.
10. I went back to school and finished up college at Cornell. In my senior year, I got nominated by Cornell to represent the University in the Rhodes Scholar competition. I didn't win. I lost. It sucked. 
11. In my senior year at Cornell, I had been involved with this wonderful, sweet girl from Kentucky who was two years my junior. She loved me and wanted us to stay together after we graduated. I'll put it this way: I would drive my beat up station wagon to the laundry mat just outside of campus. And she would come with me, just to hang out at the laundry mat, in the middle of winter, and spend time together. But of course, I was too young and too immature to appreciate her. So after I graduated, I was basically like I love you but the distance will never work. And that was that. Some time later, when I realized what I had done, it was too late. She was gone. I lost her. It sucked.
12. I went to teach high school in inner-city Baltimore. I had huge beef with my principal who thought it was ok for students to, you know, stab people, assault people, threaten to rape female teachers etc BUT not get suspended. Her rationale for this was (1) we had one of the highest suspension rates in the city and (2) she had a high paying job and wasn't going to risk her job by calling even more attention to the school so (3) she would handle these incidents "in house." I am not kidding. So clearly, me being the crusader I am, I went toe-to-toe with my principal over her dangerous, immoral decisions. She had me suspended from the school mid-year. Those 10th graders were my babies. I loved those kids. But I wasn't allowed to go back. I was forcibly transferred across town to another school where I took over a class that had already had and disposed of 3 teachers that year. I lost really bad that time. It sucked. 
13. In the fall, when I called Baltimore City Schools to see if I had been picked up by another school or reassigned, they told me no, I didn't have a job. So that pretty much sucked. I went up to Jersey to work with a high school friend of mine who said him and his friend had a brilliant business idea that was about to get off the ground. Turned out that was bullshit. I bounced around, work some odd jobs. I got a call from my mom saying a letter had arrived in the mail from the Baltimore City Schools. I asked her to please open it and read it. As it turns out, I had been reassigned after all and to an amazing charter school. But because I "failed to report" to work for the first few weeks of the school year, I was being put out of the system. You can't make this stuff up! Somebody in the Baltimore Schools went out of their way to hide my reassignment so I'd leave town to find another job... and then turn around and "put me out" of the system for failure to report. Strangely enough, a police officer at my original school, Officer Peabody, told me this was going to happen. He basically said, "P, you got some enemies in the system. They're gonna try and put you out." And they did. So basically I lost again. It sucked. 
14. I couldn't go to law school that year because I couldn't even apply to law school without my undergrad transcripts. And guess what? I couldn't get my transcripts from Cornell because I owed them like $2,500. At the time, that was an astronomical sum of money for me. So I resolved that I'd have to lose an entire year. I'd go home to rural PA and do whatever work I could get to pay off Cornell, plus pay on my student loans, plus survive, then apply to law school. I lost a whole freaking year. It sucked. 
15. I went to law school at Georgetown. I was out in Vegas and had to rent an apartment in DC for law school. So I rented this place sight unseen from an advertisement online. I was seriously that gullible. When I showed up, it wasn't really a separate apartment. It was basically a crazy woman's basement. I had already given her the money for first month, last month and security deposit. She was really, really crazy. As in stalk me, demand I go contra dancing with her and lock me out. You can't make this stuff up. I had to leave. I lost all the money I paid; she wouldn't give it back. I wound up having to live in what was basically a frat house up in Silver Spring and commute like an hour to law school every day for the next couple months, until I found a room to rent in DC that I could afford. Meanwhile, I barely went to class because, you know, I was broke and had to make money. I lost yet again! It sucked.
16. I tried out for moot court in law school. For whatever reason, that didn't go so well. It wasn't my best day. I don't think I had a real chance to show my skill at argumentation and debate. I didn't make the cut. I lost again. It sucked. 
17. I tried this federal jury trial a couple years ago, representing the plaintiff in a commercial negligence case. The jury came back and returned a finding that the defendant had been grossly negligent. Amazing! That's not an easy thing to prove. But that finding got extinguished by an affirmative defense! Talk about soul-crushing. By the time the jury finished reading its verdict, I was about to throw up. I lost. It sucked really, really bad.

Lots of people look around at others and only see their highlight reels. That's because so many people carefully craft the narrative that others see to make it seem like their lives are nothing but one epic victory after another. As a result, stupid people assume that other people have these spectacularly easy lives where nothing bad or tough ever happens. These are the same stupid people who say things like, "It must be nice...". Look, nobody has a perfect life. Nobody wins all the time.  The people who win - and win big - in the end usually have a lowlight reel filled with spectacular losses, failures and soul-crushing defeats. 

I have amassed a string of epic, spectacular, devastating, soul crushing defeats and setbacks, both personally and professionally. But every time, I pick myself up and keep pushing forward. As Robert Frost once said about life: It goes on.

- JP