Ghosts of failures past

 I got a letter in the mail completely out of the blue yesterday. The first sentence said "Our records indicate that you have been withdrawn from (removing name of my school) College." This came as quite a surprise, since I’m enrolled full-time for the fall, and in fact am currently right in the middle of a summer class. 

I started frantically thinking of what might have happened. Did I forget to pay my bill? No, the memory of paying thousands of dollars is still fresh in my mind. Did I miss a registration deadline? No, I just registered for fall a few weeks ago. What happened, then?

I guess I’m just used to screwing things up and invariably having my failures come up to bite me in the ass eventually. Back during my first attempt at college, I screwed up royally. I stopped going to classes, didn’t turn in assignments, and just kind of waited for the letters to show up…the letter saying I had lost my academic scholarship, the letter saying I was on academic probation, etc.

After I dropped out of school, I usually managed fine with working and paying my bills, but thanks to my lovely case of ADD, I almost always waited until the last minute to pay anything. It’s hard to explain how it works, but pretty much anyone with adult ADD relates to this: I will write out a check, address the envelope, put a stamp on it, and then just not mail it. It’s not forgetting…I just don’t DO it. I can’t explain it at all, but everyone I’ve ever met with ADD totally gets what I’m talking about, so I guess it’s part of the disorder.

So, I usually managed to get stuff paid at the last minute, but sometimes I screwed up, so I always feared the mail because there might be a collection notice or something. As I’ve gotten older I’ve mostly learned ways to just kind of deal with my ADD, and I obviously pay my bills now. But I still always have this little fear in the back of my mind that one of the many ways I have screwed up in my life will catch up to me. I still get nervous when I get the mail, even though I haven’t gotten a collection thing in years.

So when I got this letter yesterday, rather than figuring that someone else had made a mistake, I immediately went to assuming I had screwed up and had been kicked out of school. Of course, the financial aid office had just sent me the wrong letter, and I’m still enrolled in school. And I felt kind of dumb for freaking out about it so much.

But I still just have this fear every single day that I’ll screw up everything in my life. I feel like I’ve really come a long way since my first time through college. I’m (usually) a good, responsible parent. My bills get paid. I have a 4.0 average in school. But I don’t trust myself. When I do well at things, I feel like I’m faking it. Like, my professors will all realize that I’m actually a crappy student and start failing me, someone will realize that I’m totally disorganized and irresponsible and decide I’m not fit to be a mother.

I wonder if I’ll ever learn to trust my own ability to function in life, or if I’ll always be just waiting for the next failure. I wonder whether I’ll ever stop dreading the mail.