How I Made Peace with the Secret Failure Behind My Successful Career

Helping my daughter with her pre-calculus homework took me back to failing calculus in college

My husband says the one thing they don’t tell you about parenting is that it makes you re-examine your own childhood. Your memories of the highs and lows of those developmental years are triggered at the oddest times, especially when you see your child going through their own growing pains. I had one of those moments recently with our 12-year-old daughter while helping her with her math homework.

Our daughter is a multifaceted overachiever. She plays soccer, is a proficient pianist, does beautiful sketches, makes straight A’s, and one day, she hopes to be an astrophysicist. She has that bright-eyed wonder about learning and trying new things that hasn’t been dimmed so far by life and its obstacles.

Partially inspired by the cult classic film Mean Girls, she joined the Mathletes team at her middle school so she could compete in local math competitions. (“We even get jerseys, Mom,” she told me excitedly. “Like the jackets in the movie!”) She’s always excelled at math, so her dad and I were supportive of her joining. But it turns out that support also meant dusting off our long-buried math skills to help her train. I was expecting her to ask us for help with a few algebraic equations that I would struggle to calculate. But some nights ago, she came into our bedroom with a worksheet that looked a lot more complicated.

“It’s pre-calculus. The high school teacher came to practice and taught us functions,” our daughter explained.

My husband, zoning out while listening to music in his earbuds, was admittedly exhausted from a trying workday. So I decided to “take one for the team:” I offered to help our daughter with her pre-cal homework. But she demurred.

“It’s okay, Mom. You don’t have to. I know you failed calculus in college,” she said in the casual way that kids often do when their words are more savage than Fenty loungewear. I know that type of bluntness doesn’t come from malice but an unfiltered innocence that only children have. It still cuts deep though.

The truth is I did fail calculus in college even after taking the course twice. I also barely passed my physics and engineering courses although I was a civil engineering major. In fact, my grades were so poor my freshman year that I lost my scholarship and seriously contemplated dropping out of school.

It was a steep fall for an 18-year-old who was once like my daughter—a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed overachiever. I graduated third in my high school class of almost 200 students. I got accepted to Ivy League colleges. I was sure I was destined for greatness, and my extended family expected the same of me. I would be one of the first college graduates in our family. I would become a civil engineer and architect, start my own firm, make oodles of money, and make everyone proud of me. Before he died, my grandfather bestowed me with a construction hat with my last name printed on the front that he wanted me to wear one day on worksites. For Christmas, my parents bought me a drafting table and put it in my bedroom so I would have a proper place to draw schematics.

Because I knew I had these dreams to fulfill, I ignored the red flags that hinted at what was to come. I dismissed how lonely I was in my math and engineering classes where I was one of few girls and one of two Black students. I tried my best to find fulfillment in lessons that I found boring and uninspiring. I’d study for hours, only to freeze up during tests. When I got the test back later, marked in red, I’d be crushed, feeling the weight of expectations I was starting to doubt I could meet.

After a while, I began to dread getting up for school every day. I experienced panic attacks between classes that left me hiding in restrooms doing breathing exercises. After I started having fleeting thoughts of suicide, I couldn’t overlook the red flags anymore. I had to accept that no matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t going to pass those classes. I wasn’t going to be the person I thought I’d become. So I quit. I dropped out of the engineering and architecture programs and shoved the construction helmet my grandfather had given me to the back of my closet, knowing I would never wear it. My parents gave the drafting table to a family friend.

With a low GPA and unable to afford my college tuition anymore without my scholarship, I transferred to a cheaper state college that was willing to accept me. Instead of seeing it as a new opportunity, I was terrified I’d make things even worse. I was starting all over again while grappling with the stinging reality of failure. I also had to create a new vision for my future and find an identity outside of being an “overachiever”— a role that I’d relished and now mourned.

So, who was I, and what should I study? Could I figure it out or would I remain a quitter and a failure? I wrote through my feelings and doubts. I expressed my frustrations on paper and in blog posts and fantasized about a reality filled with fictional characters with storylines that helped me escape, that kept me entertained and invested. As it turned out, those rants and scribbled stories created the pathway to my future.

I decided to write professionally and enrolled in the School of Journalism at my new university. I completed a short story that was a finalist for a national contest. It was later published in an anthology that appeared in bookstores around the country. After I graduated, I became an award-winning reporter and NAACP-Image Award-nominated novelist. I did succeed, but not in the way I’d thought I would.

Now, more than twenty years later with my daughter’s precalculus homework in front of me, I was not only unsure if I was ready to tackle the equations on the worksheet, but also the ghosts from my past. After all, this stuff nearly broke me when I was 18. It left behind years of insecurity and self-doubt. But time heals old wounds, as they say, and parenthood often pushes you past your comfort zone. I couldn’t refuse to help my daughter simply because I was worried I’d get triggered by functions.

“Yes, I failed calculus,” I explained to her, “but I think I remember some of it. I’m willing to try.”

That answer was good enough for our daughter.

A few seconds later, she sat down beside me on the bed and we began her homework together. The equations weren’t triggering, and they were nowhere near as challenging as I’d thought they’d be. By the third math problem, I was shocked at how easy they were. I could now quickly solve something that had stumped me as a college freshman.

“You’re better at math than I thought, Mom,” my daughter said.

She was right. I was better at it than we both thought I’d be. So why could I do functions now but hadn’t been able to do them back then? Had it been because of the overwhelming pressure I felt at the time, or was it because of poor instruction from my professors? Would I have done better on a more diverse campus? Or had there been some small part of me at 18 that was whispering, then screaming when I wouldn’t listen, “This is not meant for you! This is not who you want to be!”

I guess I’ll never know for sure.

My daughter and I finished most of the problems that night, agreeing to tackle the rest in a couple of days. I went to bed satisfied that I’d figured out her math equations but happier that long ago, I’d solved a much bigger challenge than functions, one that mattered more than calculus.

I figured out what I really wanted to be and what was right for me.

L.S. Stratton is an NAACP Image Award-nominated author and former newspaper crime reporter who has written more than thirty books under different pen names in just about every genre from thrillers to romance to historical fiction. She has fully embraced her childhood self by writing her first young adult novel, Sundown Girls, a paranormal thriller, that hits shelves Jan. 27, 2026.