Rachel Simmons
I wandered the foggy streets of Oxford feeling lost. I wanted desperately to go home, but how could I quit? How could I walk away from this, one of the greatest accomplishments for a young American? Who did that? It would be totally humiliating. And I was no quitter. So I kept pushing myself. I would do it. I would accomplish this.
In the meantime, I spent weeks reading, walking, going on runs, and, truth be told, crying. I kept thinking, Who am I? How did I get here? How did I wind up in a country I didn’t particularly care to be in, with people so unlike me, reading books that put me to sleep?
The answer was that I had become a Rhodes scholar not because I wanted to study at Oxford for two years, but because I wanted the recognition. Winning awards, after all, was what I did. My self-esteem, the basic foundation of who I was, had been built on it. When I could not win for the first time in my life—when I could not set my mind to going after something and accomplishing it—I fell apart.
—From Mistakes I Made at Work: 25 Influential Women Reflect on What They Got Out of Getting It Wrong, by Jessica (Levine) Bacal ’92. Plume, 2014