Fully Failed

One cloudy winter morning I started writing this piece. I woke up on a morning I thought would be like any other walked my dog, had my coffee, and felt the start of a productive day coming on. Then around noon, I popped over to MSNBC—just to you know, check out the reading of the electoral votes, something I have never done before in my life but felt extraordinarily vital to do in 2021. As you may be able to guess the events of January 6th derailed my writing and it took me a long time to regain my motivation. What I started that day I completely forgot as America crumbled before our eyes.

Now, storytime.

In my junior year in high school, my mom ran for re-election for Mayor of Cleveland, and needless to say, life became chaotic both during the campaign and in its aftermath. It is rare that when your mother loses her job it becomes front-page news and the talk of the town.

 It was exhausting to walk down the halls of high school and constantly be bombarded by questions about whether I thought my mom would win and about the impact of her policies. It felt like being trapped in a snow globe—everyone outside feels entitled to ask something from you, but all you can do is shake around inside trapped inside.  I was attempting to be a normal teenage girl with all the typical issues—friendship drama, lunch table politics, boy problems—and the outside world felt entitled to saddle up to our dinner table and tell me exactly why they thought my mother was a success or a failure.

By the time November rolled around, it felt like nothing could go right and I didn’t have time to catch my breath. This was about the time I did one of the more ridiculous things only a privileged white girl whose mother was the Mayor could do—I voluntarily chose to fail Spanish because I refused to change my lunch period.

Yes, it is exactly as unnecessary as it sounds.

At Shaker Heights High School lunch was split into 3 different periods: 4th-period lunch with 5/6th and 7/8th period class, 6th-period lunch with 4/5th and 7/8th period class, or 8th-period lunch with 4/5th and 5/6th period class. In my junior year, I followed the prescribed course for high achieving white girls at Shaker and enrolled in as many AP courses as possible, including AP Spanish, and ended up in 8th-period lunch. However, most of my friends from my sophomore year were in 6th-period lunch. The first day of school I felt like Cady in Mean Girls staring around the cafeteria with no clue where to sit. I chose to eat with an old friend but felt out of place surrounded by one friend and a group of loose acquaintances.  

Within a few weeks, a small group of us began to eat in a random foyer of a side entrance door. An island of misfit toys sitting on the floor of a doorway eating lunch. As you can tell people didn’t strictly stick to eating in the cafeteria at Shaker. This oddball group of friends became surprisingly life-giving in part because it gave me a chance to eat lunch away from dozens of prying eyes. It was an intoxicatingly liberating feeling for a 16-year-old whose life was a chaotic mess.

While I thought I could handle AP Spanish—let me tell you I was all the way wrong. I was deeply unqualified for AP Spanish and quickly fell behind and soon the depths of my inability to pass the course became glaringly obvious. Initially, my teacher showed me a lot of grace riding on the potential theory that stress was causing my grade rather than my complete inability to grasp the content. When it became apparent that no matter what the cause I was unequivocally going to fail my teacher and counselor tried to convince me to switch to a lower Spanish level. I was hovering at 50% and there was simply no way to recover from a solid F.

My counselor offered me a simple solution, transfer to Honors Spanish, switch my lunch period from 8th to 6th, work really hard, and try to come out with a C. It seemed like an easy, dare I say logical, solution to a problem that would stain my academic future and change my college prospects. However, I utterly refused her solution because I would not give up 8th-period lunch.

In this same window of time, some of my closest friends chose the absolute worst moment to ask questions about my new friends in 8th-period lunch. I was summoned to Starbucks and they expressed concerns that I may be hanging out with trouble. In my mind the conversation went something like this: We don’t like your new friends because they are wilder and they could no longer be friends with me because my mom wasn’t Mayor. In reality, the conversation probably went something like who are your new friends and how’s the weather but there was so much happening in my life I wasn’t capable of hearing any sort of critique at that moment. Neither of them has any recollection of this conversation nor was it the malicious friend dumping I heard that day.

The high school friends I failed Spanish to avoid

No matter what actually happened in the course of the conversation it was a crushing heartbreak that can only be truly felt in the height of teenage drama. I remember sobbing at the kitchen table to my sister that all my friends left the moment I was no longer the Mayor’s daughter. I felt like I no longer had any friends besides the few I ate lunch with.

This brings me back to the “so you’re failing Spanish” conundrum. Honors Spanish would require me to leave 8th-period lunch and go to 6th-period, a terrifying jungle with girls who just dumped me. The thought of 6th period lunch was quite literally more terrifying than failing a class. It felt like my 8th-period friends were the only thing tethering me to shore and losing it would be absolutely devastating. I was just angry enough, just stubborn enough, and just privileged enough to refuse to change my lunch period even if that meant I failed Spanish and for my counselor to say “ok, let’s see what we can do.”

My ability to arbitrarily bend rules was driven in part by my privilege and in part by my counselor’s concern for my mental health. For the better part of 2006 and some of 2007, I was about one bad day away from a stress-induced mental breakdown. I think my counselor could see the writing on the walls and made a calculated decision to listen to my demand to keep my lunch period rather than run the risk of the former Mayor’s daughter having a public meltdown. There is a litany of politicians’ children having destructive breakdowns in the middle of the street and that would just be bad press for both my family and the school for me to go off the rails.

And so, I had new rules just for me. I literally had an IEP made so the class I was in could mirror the class I could have easily transferred into. Undeniably one of the most stubbornly privileged things I have done.  I stayed in the AP Spanish class but was enrolled in Honors Spanish which meant I got slightly fewer complex assignments, a 25% grade boost, and more rudimentary quizzes. Needless to say, even with all the bells and whistles brought out for me I still failed. Technically I came out with a D- but if you take away the 25% grade boost it is actually more of an F-. I fully fucking failed.

 While my counselor aided my “how many ways can you fail a class” escapades for a semester but in the spring she gave me an ultimatum to withdraw from Spanish or change my lunch. I unquestioningly chose to withdraw. This left me with a free period and since I had tapped out on privilege for the year I worked as a lunch aid in the special needs classroom at the elementary school across the street during my free period. It was a breath of fresh air to feel useful and with people who truly did not care about or know who my mother was.

In the end, I got a tutor for summer school to expunge the F from my record so it didn’t impact my academic future in an obvious way, but it did have other ripple effects.  In the face of the first F of my academic career, my response to my father's concern was “don’t worry I’ll just become fluent one day.” A completely outlandish response that was definitely an empty promise I made as a teenager.

Consciously choosing to fail Spanish and quelling my father’s fear with “don’t worry I will become fluent one day” made me feel enough guilt to actually try to fulfill that empty promise. It was in my mind when I applied for Peace Corps and throughout the meandering path of my 20s from California to a remote mountain village in Peru to seminary in Cuba—with a brief pitstop in Havana to translate for Fidel Castro—and ending at Yale Divinity School. I think if I hadn’t failed, I may not be fluent in Spanish because I wouldn’t have felt the need to put myself in situations that required me to try.

The same group of girls I worked tirelessly to avoid in 2006 on a trip to Austin in 2018

Additionally, this story makes me think of the power of memory. I had a powerful memory of a dramatic conversation in Starbucks that led me down the road towards failure, yet my friends don’t even remember the conversation. It the age-old question of intent versus impact. Whatever their intent was on that day it had an outsized impact on my life. It was a defining conversation for how I understood myself in relationships with my peers and how I trusted people in high school. The impact of the conversation that day led me to believe we were no longer friends, yet they remain some of my closest friends to this day.

Making a Herculean effort to avoid my friends for three months actually turned out to be a gift far down the road. I know I have the luxury of saying that the most stubbornly bratty thing I ever did in high school turned out well, but this isn’t a story about how life sometimes wraps up in a neat little bow when we least expect it.

It is about the inflection moments, the moments we chose to make a decision, turn right or turn left, ask for help or stay silent, chose friends or academics. The moments that shape our lives some for the better and some for the worse. I will never know how life would have turned out if I had just chosen to switch Spanish classes just like I will never know what would have happened if I asked for help in moments I chose to stay silent. It is easy to get trapped in the cycle of “coulda, woulda, shoulda” especially when it feels like you made such an obviously wrong decision. But as my mother always says thinking of changing the past is just shoulding all over yourself. Whether you chose left or right, to speak up or stay silent, friends or academics, you can’t undo it, but you can reflect on how those decisions indelibly impacted how you relate to the world.