I used to feel this way too. I won’t go into details, but let’s just say it got extremely bad at one point and I regret a lot from that time period.
I walked in as a freshman in high school, having never failed a test, into my geometry class. Little did I know that I would get ~5 As on tests all year. I also failed my final, which determined whether I got an A or not. Needless to say, after the first nine weeks, I broke.
But I broke, and came back stronger than I was before. Failure can be a good thing. I wasn’t used to failing, and my geometry class taught me how to bounce back when I fall. It was a miserable year in that class, but it helped me learn how to fail, an invaluable skill that can only be learned through experience.
Also, I graduated my freshman year with a 4.4 weighted GPA. The maximum was a 4.5. In the grand scheme of the things, a few failed tests don’t matter.
So how do you overcome this feeling?
Fail. A lot. There’s no way around it, it’ll have to happen at some point. You’re going to break and it will feel like the world is collapsing around you, but just hang in there and you’ll come back stronger.It really isn’t the end of the world. Even most Harvard students don’t have a perfect GPA, so if you mess up in a few classes, you’ll still be fine. And on an even smaller scale, if you mess up on a test/exam, it’ll be okay.
Grades don’t matter, degrees do. If you’re in college, just pass the class and you’ll be fine. I promise you your future career options won’t be limited because of your GPA. As long as you’re learning the information so you can perform well in the “real world”, that’s all that matters.
Get help. Knowing you gave it your all and tapped into every resource you could find makes a huge difference in how you feel about (that) failure. And hey, maybe you won’t fail with the extra help 