Failing the Exam

18 Jun 2024

Jack Kornfield related the following story in an interview with Tim Ferris:

I went to see Ram Dass after I’d had a couple of events where I fell over on stage and was unconscious for a while and opened my eyes eventually and I was surrounded by all the doctors who were part of the audience and so forth and I got all these workups and I had a lot of tremors and I got misdiagnosed as having something like ALS, I was going to die relatively quickly, and I would have dementia with it.

I thought I’d made my peace with dying, “Okay, I’m going to die.” But then when they said, “Oh, yeah, and dementia, too,” that flipped me over the edge. That’s not how I had pictured it and I got frightened, really. I remember sitting with my daughter after I got that and crying a little bit and thinking, “Okay, here we go into dementia land along with tremors and my body going out of control.” Then a couple of weeks later, I got more tests and turned out that was the wrong diagnosis and I’m okay, I’m fine, I’m just aging like everybody.

But I went to see Ram Dass and I told him that story and I said, “I thought I was cool with death. I’d done all these meditations in the monastery sitting with dead bodies and my own practice. Then when the dementia came in, I got frightened,” and he looked at me, he laughed, and he said, “Oh, yeah, I flunked the course a number of times.” The minute he said it, it was like this huge relief because it was just being human.

When I heard this story it instantly became my new mantra, except that somehow it got changed in my head to “failing the exam,” perhaps because of the extreme focus on exams in my education.

When I was 8 years old, my parents separated and then later divorced. Before they separated there was lots of fighting, arguing, and depression. My takeaway from this experience was that if I didn’t learn to control my emotions, then the world would divorce me. If I became too emotional, too needy, too overwhelming, whoever had to deal with it would turn to me and say “I’m sorry Dylan but this isn’t going to work out.”

So I became very good at listening to other people’s needs and trying to fulfill them, especially those of authority figures. When people told me they needed me to work hard, get a good job, and save the world, I listened to them.

And the world kept rewarding me for my “work ethic,” “motivation,” and “talent.” I got good grades, a high salary, approval, and respect. When I was at the University of Washington, I got invited to join the computer science department, one of the best in the country. When I left my first job out of school, my boss told me that it was “rare to have this kind of impact so early in your career.” I started mountain climbing and found I could do things that other people couldn’t even really imagine.

What all this did is create what I have dubbed my superiority-inferiority complex. Society kept telling me that I was better than everyone, and I needed to keep collecting the evidence that it was true to disprove my greatest fear that my deepest need for love would not and could not ever be met. We talk a lot about impostor syndrome but this was slightly different. There was impostor syndrome but it included a level of internalized (and completely unconscious) arrogance that I had to cling to as the only thing that could save me from annihilation.

But now, after all these years of becoming a perfect student, a star employee, and a skilled mountain climber, I am finally learning how to be human.

These days I never get my to-do list done. My yard is full of weeds. My monthly income is way less than what it was last year, for the same amount of work. I don’t kid myself about meeting deadlines¹ anymore. I cry weekly. I have enough anxiety that I have to constantly say no, cancel plans, or not respond. I have no idea what it will be like tomorrow.

I am failing the exams of success, approval, positivity, and control.

But every exam I fail is a literal weight off my body as long held patterns of tension slowly release and dissipate. And from somewhere deep inside, the love I’ve always looked for is welling up and pouring forth.

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