HONEST REFLECTIONS  ·  THE LONG ROAD

Today I found out I didn’t get into Fuqua. I’m on the waitlist at Haas. And I got into an online program I wasn’t sure I even wanted. I cried my eyes out. This is me being honest about all of it.

I want to write this while it still stings, while my eyes are still puffy and my chest still feels heavy, because I think the polished version of this story can wait. The real version needs to be told first.

I have been working toward this for two years. Two years of studying for the GRE after long days at work, after putting my son to bed, in the quiet hours when the rest of the world was resting and I was at a desk trying to become someone who deserved a seat at the table. Two years. Just me, a single mom, grinding in the margins of a life that was already full to the edges.

THE INTERVIEW I ALMOST DIDN’T SURVIVE

When Fuqua gave me an interview, I thought that was the sign. The confirmation that the sacrifices were adding up to something.

The interview was scheduled during Lunar New Year. I had gone back to Vietnam for the first time in six years. Six years. There were people I had been aching to see, relatives, old friends, faces that exist only in memories that are starting to blur at the edges. And I couldn’t see most of them because I had a narrow window to complete the interview and I could not miss it.

My dad was in the hospital that week with a hypertensive crisis. I sat in a room somewhere in Vietnam, composed myself, opened my laptop, and did the interview. I smiled. I answered the questions. I tried to sound like someone who had it together.

And today they said no.

“I gave that interview everything I had, from a country I had not seen in six years, while my father was in a hospital bed down the road.”

THE QUESTION I KEEP ASKING

Is it worth it?

I genuinely don’t know right now. And I think that’s allowed. Everyone talks about sacrifice like it’s a clean transaction, like if you give enough, the universe will balance the books and hand you what you earned. But real life doesn’t work that way, and sitting here today, I feel the gap between what I gave and what I received, and it hurts.

I look around and it seems like everyone is moving forward. Getting the jobs, getting the acceptances, hitting the milestones. And I’m here, still trying, still getting doors closed in my face, still asking myself when enough effort becomes enough.

They say do it to become the best version of yourself. They say self-improvement is the goal. And I believe that, I do. But nobody talks about how lonely and exhausting that road can be when you’re walking it alone, with a child depending on you, with a father in the hospital, with a life that keeps asking more of you than you feel like you have left to give.

WHEN DO YOU STOP TRYING?

I asked myself that today. I think a lot of us ask it, quietly, in the moments we don’t post about.