Give Yourself Grace.

There’s a phrase I used to write in Instagram highlights whenever someone asked me for OT school advice: give yourself grace. I’d put it in a bold black box, white letters, very sure of itself. Underneath it I’d list what grace was supposed to cover - to fail, to succeed, to grow, to learn, to be refined. It looked complete. It looked like something you could screenshot and keep.

I want to tell you what I didn’t put in the box.

I said that phrase for the first time, out loud, in my professor’s office, not in a caption. It was after a practical exam where I froze on a goniometry measurement I’d done correctly probably forty times before. Forty times in the lab, on classmates, on foam models, on myself in the mirror at midnight the night before. And then in the actual room, with the actual clipboard, my hands just stopped knowing what they knew. I stood there holding a plastic Goni against someone’s elbow like I’d never seen one before in my life.

I didn’t cry in the room. I cried in the hallway, and then I cried more thoroughly in my professor’s office, which had become something of a regular stop for me by that point in the semester - not because I was failing, exactly, but because I had developed a talent for interpreting “not perfect” as “failing,” and there was no one in my life yet who was going to correct that math for me except her.

She didn’t tell me to give myself grace that day. I want to be honest about that, because I think I’ve flattened the memory over the years into something cleaner than it was. What she actually said was something more like: you know how to do this. Your hands know how to do this. What just happened in there wasn’t a knowledge problem. And I remember being almost offended by that, in the specific way you’re offended when someone is right about something you were hoping to be wrong about. Because if it wasn’t a knowledge problem, then it was a me problem. And a me problem felt so much harder to study for.

It took me a long time - longer than I’d like to admit, months, maybe closer to a year - to understand what she actually meant, which was that I had built an entire academic identity around not needing grace. I was the student who over-prepared specifically so that grace would never be required. Grace, in my mind, was the thing you fell back on after you’d already lost. It was consolation. It was what people said to you gently after telling you the actual outcome. I didn’t want consolation. I wanted to not need it.

So when I write “give yourself grace” now, I have to be careful, because I know exactly how that phrase can be received by someone who thinks the way I used to think. It can sound like being told to relax about your own decline. Like someone’s handing you a softer word for failure and asking you to be grateful for the cushioning.

That is not what I mean. I don’t think it’s what my professor meant either, though it took me leaving that office, and a lot of other rooms after it, to understand the difference.

Here’s what I think grace actually is, in the specific and unglamorous way it showed up for me: it’s the decision to stay in the room after the goniometry measurement goes wrong. Not to leave gracefully, not to accept the failure gracefully, but to literally remain physically present in your own life immediately after the moment you wanted to disappear from it. That’s it. That’s the whole mechanism. Grace isn’t a feeling you generate about yourself. It’s a behavior. It’s staying.

I think about this in four parts now, because that’s how it eventually got structured for me, and because those four words did end up meaning something, even if I originally wrote them for other people’s screenshots before I understood them for myself.

Grace to fail. Not grace that prevents failure, or reframes it, or finds the silver lining before you’ve even finished being upset. Just grace that lets the failure be exactly as bad as it is for as long as it needs to be, without you deciding what it means about you before you’ve even stopped shaking. I failed that exam, retook it, and passed it competently, unremarkably - the kind of pass that doesn’t make a good story. Most of my failures ended that way. Not with triumph. With adequacy, eventually, after the appropriate amount of time.

Grace to succeed. This one surprised me, because I assumed success would take care of itself. It didn’t. I remember getting through my first Level II fieldwork placement - actually good, actually competent, actual positive feedback from my FWE - and not knowing what to do with it, because I’d spent so long rehearsing for disappointment that I didn’t have a rehearsed response for things going well. I caught myself waiting for the correction that didn’t come. Grace, here, meant letting the good outcome be the outcome, instead of treating it as a delay before the real verdict.

Grace to grow. This is the one that gets used the most and understood the least, I think, because growth sounds active and forward-moving, and so much of what I’d call growth actually looked like standing still for an uncomfortably long time. Not doing anything with the exam failure for weeks. Not resolving it. Just carrying it around, present-tense, until one day it had quietly become a thing that happened to me instead of a thing that defined me. Nobody decided that. It just eventually became true, the way bruises eventually become the color of your regular skin again.

Grace to be refined. I used to hear “refined” and think of something being smoothed down - sanded, softened, made more presentable. I don’t think that’s right either. I think refinement, at least the kind that happened to me in that office and in the year after it, was closer to being separated from something that wasn’t actually me. The part of me that needed to never need grace - that wasn’t a virtue I was protecting. It was ore. It had to come off for the actual metal to be visible at all.

I don’t know if I fully believe in the tidy version of this that I used to post. I think grace, practiced honestly, is less like a warm blanket and more like a stubborn refusal to leave the room. It’s unglamorous. It doesn’t feel like being gentle with yourself in the moment - it mostly just feels like enduring the moment without adding a second injury on top of the first one, which is what self-judgment usually is. A second injury, layered onto a first one that was already going to heal on its own.

I still have that highlight saved. I looked at it again before writing this. The black box, the white letters, the four words underneath in a clean list. It’s not wrong, what I wrote. I just wrote it before I’d lived it, which meant I wrote the destination without any of the walking.

I think what I’d add now, if I could go back and edit it, isn’t a fifth word. It’s just this - grace was never the reward at the end of getting through OT school. It was the only thing that let me stay in the room long enough to actually get through it at all.

TK