Never give up hope

In case you haven't already noticed, I like to use life lessons in my blog hoping people can learn or take something away from them. If that is all that you get out of this blog, that's all that matters to me.

This past weekend I went to Des Moines to take my EMT boards. My nerves were running wild, I had butterflies in my stomach for one whole week and I had never shook so bad in my life. Going into the testing center I was asked to remove everything from my pockets, they took a scan of my handprint and then had to give my self another pat-down before I went in to test. A woman sat in what looked like this control booth with a 180 degree view of what was going on in the room. She handed me a pair of ear-plugs so I just assumed that I was supposed to put them in; that was a terrible idea.

As I sat down to take my test, I placed the plugs in my ears and then saw the start button on the bottom of the screen. My heart was like a drum pounding in my head and after that point, it's as if I don't remember a single thing that was on the stinking test.

I finished, they escorted me out and I was on my way. I had never felt so nautious after taking a test before and really didn't feel good about what the outcome was going to be. Don't ask me why; something jsut didn't feel right.

All weekend I continued to have that "butterfly" feeling in my stomach and kept checking the website. This morning before school, I checked and it had informed me that my first attempt was unsuccessful. It's almost as if the wind was knocked right out of me. I felt like a failure and didn't know where to go from here.

I talked with many people about it and they said it really wasn't uncommon for someone to fail their first attempt. All you can do is study harder and give it your best a second time. A lot of this took put me at ease.

It was at this point that I finally realized, everyone has a time in their life where they need to try many times to achieve a goal. It's not going to come to you, you have to go to it. It sort of reminds me of Thomas Edison and the light bulb. It might have taken him thousands of attempts and failures to make one light bulb shine bright, but to get to that point he had to persevere and never give up on his goals.