As the stadium lights slowly began to blind me, the smile I was wearing started to fade as I felt an overwhelming, nauseating sensation flow over my entire body; I thought that flags only slipped through hands on battlefields, not on a Friday night during a high school half time show. Failure is a one-way mirror. When standing in front of the mirror, the failure simply stares back in the form of a reflection. My first performance for the high school color guard amounted to the show flag slipping through my clutches and slamming onto the freshly cut, football field grass. The searing embarrassment that followed felt like the end of the world. What I did not realize was that this failure would shape how I would handle embarrassment in the
