I AM PAINED.

It's a lie when I said it was no big deal. Trust me, I was trying to be brave when I said, "We win some, we lose some." I woke up in the middle of the night clutching my chest because I couldn't breathe properly. Later, I cried myself to sleep because the possibility of what if simply wouldn't leave me.

I participated in an essay writing competition recently. If you know me, you'll know my writing means the world to me. For me, it isn't just words on a blank page. It is soul to paper. It is pouring out the entirety of my being, unraveling every part of myself and laying it bare.

I had plenty of time to write the essay, but I wouldn't be Favour Okwanyionu if I didn't leave things until the last minute. About a week before the deadline, I finally became serious about my research because I was writing on a topic I had little prior knowledge of.

Eventually, my essay was ready.

Because it meant so much to me, I was intentional. I was meticulous. I remember using my phone's split screen feature while submitting it. On one side was my gallery with the competition guidelines, and on the other was the submission page. I was that thorough. So when I was told I had been disqualified for violating the guidelines, I told our Sec Gen. he had to be mistaken.

I could have sworn on my life that I followed every single instruction because I had been so intentional about it.

But sometimes life hands us experiences we simply cannot explain.

That was exactly how I felt when I was sent evidence that, despite all my thoroughness, I had still missed the mark. Somehow, I had submitted my essay as a PDF instead of a DOCX file.

What made it even more frustrating was that I had intentionally written the essay in Google Docs. I write almost everything in Notepad, but one of the guidelines specifically required a DOCX submission, so I didn't want to take any chances. I wrote it in Google Docs, saved it there, and somewhere between exporting the file and sending the email, it became a PDF. I never noticed.

You know the most painful thing isn't the disqualification, nah, i'm perfectly fine with not being the best.

The painful part is knowing that something so minute, so flimsy, meant my essay would never even be read. It would never be judged. In my head, I kept thinking, "Just read the damn thing, please". I wanted so badly for it to at least have a fighting chance.

But life doesn't always go your way, it simply goes The Way.

The hurt showed up in ways I didn't expect. I lashed out at someone I shouldn't have, thereby put people who genuinely had my back in uncomfortable positions, and even ended up at odds with a certain someone.

Dearest reader, I think the point is this; you literally cannot be too careful.

And the funny thing about fear is that it has a way of inviting the very thing we're desperately trying to avoid.

I remember while I was writing the essay, a friend was around trying to distract me. I told her what I was doing was very important. She laughed and said, "Imagine you send it to the wrong email or they don't even read it."

I laughed too, I replied, "I'll just die."

Funny, isn't it?

Not because I sent it to the wrong email, but because my worst case scenario still found another route to become reality.

The idea of what could have been is one of life's cruelest concepts. It's a grief with no funeral, you don't mourn what happened, you mourn what almost did.

Maybe that's why this hurts so much, not because I lost, but because I'll never know.

Well,

Love and light.

@favvy_Okwans🖤.