The absolute best thing you can do is give yourself time to grieve…yes, grieve. This is a loss even if you were at fault. Then, sit and figure out exactly where things went wrong. Don’t beat yourself up or make yourself feel badly about it, just look at it from an objective perspective and use it as an opportunity to LEARN. Everyone, and I mean everyone, makes mistakes and does things in their life that they’re not proud of. You need to make sure, especially if you’re feeling this badly about it, that you figure out how to use it to your advantage in the future. Then, allow yourself to move on and make a plan to continue on and do whatever you were trying to do. It might mean enrolling in another school, it might mean working at a job for a little while to get back on track before you tackle education again…not a lot of details to go on in your story. But the one thing is, it’s happened and you can’t change it but you also shouldn’t let it be the thing that defines you or makes you feel like you CAN’T move forward.

Hi J (I better change my username because we have the same one and I don’t want to cause any confusion around here! In case anybody else on here wonders, this is Joe speaking – absolutely-bonkers-artsy-former-glutton-for-punishment-but-striking-back-with-a-vengeance Joe)

I am sorry to hear about your problem. I can relate, kind of – I was dismissed from a teaching job last year (I have discussed this a lot in previous posts – in a nutshell the host family I stayed with didn’t like me and the feeling was mutual, they didn’t want to host me any more, no other host families available so I had to go) When I came back home, I felt ashamed and I didn’t want people to know I had finished sooner than I thought. I didn’t want people to know why things ended the way they had. You must be feeling what I felt when I lost that job, so for this reason I won’t ask why you were kicked out of school.

Like you, I felt angry, resentful and regretful for a very long time. Some nights I couldn’t sleep for wishing bad things towards the job coordinators and the people I went to stay with at the time. When I wasn’t seething with bitterness and resentment towards them, I was cutting myself up about the fact I should have done things differently, I should have tried harder to please them. I felt absolutely defeated, and it took a long time for me to get back up. There were many “What-ifs?” – but I found that no amount of mental alternative takes and no amount of wishing ’em dead was ever going to send me back in time to change things.

That’s not to say I haven’t completely forgotten about the entire thing – I’m currently focusing on other things right now.

I think Tami is absolutely right – you need to allow yourself to grieve about this. There is no use wishing that these feelings of anger and shame are going to instantly vanish, believe me they won’t. Don’t pretend to yourself that you are fine when you are not. You take as much time as you need to reach a level of acceptance.

When the program coordinators called me to tell me it was the end for me, they told me to not dwell upon it, I did my best, I wasn’t a failure, try and see the silver lining and positive from that experience…At first I was like “Oh per-lease, don’t give me any of that ‘don’t-cry-because-it’s-over-smile-because-it-happened’ malarkey…” but I learned a lot from experience and I feel a bit more wiser for it. From that experience, I did possibly the most bravest and craziest thing I’ve ever done in my life – speaking in front of 60 or so loud-mouthed ravenous school kids without a hitch when the idea of doing something like that used to terrify me.

There has to be something good you can take from this experience – something you have learned, some kind of wisdom that you can take with you to help inform you of any important future decisions you will have to make.

It’s my personal conviction that life is for learning, occasionally screwing up on the way and growing from your setbacks. It’s times like these you learn what is really important.

But believe me, you won’t feel angry and ashamed for the rest of your life – those feelings will soon lessen. You will feel wiser and stronger eventually.

I hope this helps.

Joe