Gen Why?: At last I can laugh in face of failure

Some people are natural winners, born with talent, guaranteed to succeed at everything in life unless they lose all their limbs, brain cells and charisma in a freak nuclear train blast. The best ones keep winning even then.
But while Stephen Hawking spent preschool solving quadratic equations on his Mesopotamian abacus for under-4s, Aretha Franklin's vocal temper tantrums won a Grammy and Usain Bolt sprinted out of the womb, through the hospital and on to Olympic glory, some people struggle to achieve even the most basic of goals.
I know this because I am one of those people.
When it comes to resumes, the length of my extracurricular activities list is borderline obnoxious.
From badminton to debating, I dabbled in everything in the vain hope that I would be the best at it. I was not. Ever.
As my childhood mission of attempted extracurricular dominion continued, I got increasingly frustrated with the fact that no matter the sport, craft or activity, I would sit on the hypothetical bar of averageness, watching my peers fly by with medals, certificates and that smug look of victory on their triumphant, hateful little faces.
Eventually, when my pre-teen gawkiness was at its peak, I resolved that anything involving physical activity was not the way to go.
After at least 12 too many clichéd episodes of being the last picked on the team, the kid who sat and ate the halftime orange segments for a good 85 minutes of the game, and the pity case who had to play doubles with the coach, I decided my complete incompetency with anything involving balls, rules, terrifying sideline parents and that mythical platitude rugby captains like to call "team spirit", meant I had to switch sides. Academe was my new sport.
And I was determined.
I am not proud of the years that followed.
Desperate to be the best at anything, no matter how trivial, I became the world's most dedicated project-maker.
I pulled all-nighters in Year 6, an 800-word assignment on Asian countries transmogrified into a disturbing A1-size historical analysis on the culture, geography and politics of Singapore, including a 500-word personal reflection on why I wouldn't want to go there because of its typically humid and unpredictable climate ... and a pie chart.
If I'd known what Ritalin was I would have been pre-ordering in bulk.
My scholarly success fulfilled me for a while, but then the more pie charts I made the better I needed to do.
I studied and researched and dyed things with Chai to give it an authentic medieval feel, however, like any addiction, dependence on compulsive over-achieving does not simply evaporate when it is convenient - a factor that has come back to haunt me in my university life. No matter how mind-numbingly pointless any of my recent assignments have been, the all-powerful Nerd Demon in my head has compelled me to put far more effort into it than any rational human being would consider.
In complete contrast to my wordly and Bond-like composure in everyday life, I develop an almost vicious twitch come assignment hand-back time.
Anything below a B+ is met with inner turmoil, a staunch pokerface and 500 prayers of absolution to the God of Academia.
Which is why I didn't quite know how to react when I failed my assignment last week - a first.
The people I told didn't know what to say either.
Knowing me to be a psychotic perfectionist, my admittance was met with sympathetic headshakes, comments along the lines of "I'm sure there was a mistake", "You must have been really close to passing!", accompanied with that comforting look of patronisation that took me back to sporting failure, childhood torment and getting the runs from too many orange segments.
The truth is the opposite. My fail was not a mistake. I was not even close to passing, in fact on the reread I'm sure the only points I got were for being able to spell "contemporary technological determinism" and using an exciting font.
And yet I wasn't upset.
I didn't collapse under a burden of self-hatred, I didn't get smote by the Divine Beings of Education, I didn't even feel the need to go home and inject the Encyclopaedia Britannica into my frontal lobe.
I felt a kind of freedom, a liberty from compulsion, a feeling that, against all expectations, made me laugh.
It felt better than a thousand badminton victories put together. I highly recommend it.