The Price of Trying
On perfectionism, the fear of losing what little we have, and the uncertainty of chasing a future we cannot guarantee.
I sometimes spend more time than I should looking through university websites. I read about their programs, admission requirements, scholarships, and what life might look like for an international student. Occasionally, I find a university that genuinely interests me, and for a few minutes, I allow myself to imagine being there. Attending classes, meeting people from different backgrounds, living somewhere I’ve never been before. Nothing extraordinary, really. Just an ordinary student life in a place that currently feels very far away.
Then I start looking at the costs, and the excitement becomes a little more complicated.
I’m from Algeria. And when you’re trying to pursue an education abroad from a country like mine, money can become part of almost every decision you make. An application fee that might seem insignificant to someone else can be a serious expense for me. The same goes for language tests, documents, and everything else that comes before you even know whether a university will accept you.
It’s not that I don’t want to spend money on my future. I do. I just know that money has value beyond the number written next to it. Spending it on one opportunity means not having it for something else. And when you don’t have much to begin with, that thought stays with you.
Sometimes I find myself wondering how different this process must feel for students who don’t have to think about these things as much. We might be looking at exactly the same university, reading the same requirements, and hoping for the same acceptance letter. But the decision to apply doesn’t necessarily carry the same weight for both of us.
I don’t resent them for that. People have different circumstances, and I know there are students facing difficulties I might not even understand. Still, it’s difficult not to notice how much the place you’re born and the resources available to you can shape the choices you get to make.
I think this is part of why I’ve become so careful about my decisions.
I want to know which universities are realistic, which scholarships I could qualify for, and whether my qualifications are strong enough to justify an application. I compare options, reconsider my plans, and look for anything I might have missed. Sometimes I feel productive doing this. Other times, I finish hours of research feeling no closer to an actual decision.
There’s always another university to investigate, another requirement to check, another possibility that might be better than the ones I’ve already found.
And I don’t always know when to stop.
For a while, I thought this was simply what being responsible looked like. When your resources are limited, you can’t afford to make careless decisions. I still believe that. But I’ve also started to question whether my need to make the best possible choice is always helping me.
Sometimes I think I’m being careful when I’m actually just afraid of getting something wrong.
That’s a difficult thing to admit, especially to yourself. It’s much easier to say that you’re still researching or waiting for better conditions. Those are reasonable explanations, and often they’re true. But they can also become convenient reasons to avoid a decision that makes you uncomfortable.
I’ve been thinking about perfectionism in a different way because of this.
I used to associate it with wanting everything to be excellent. Good grades, strong projects, impressive results. The usual things. But I’m beginning to think that perfectionism isn’t always about wanting something to be perfect. Sometimes it’s about wanting to avoid the feeling of having made a mistake.
I don’t want to apply somewhere and later discover that another university would have been a better choice. I don’t want to spend money and regret it. I don’t want to dedicate months to something only to find out that I could have used that time differently.
I want to make decisions that my future self won’t question.
The problem is that I have no idea what my future self will know.
Maybe I’ll learn about opportunities I haven’t discovered yet. Maybe my interests will change. Perhaps something that seems like the right decision today will look completely different a few years from now.
I can prepare for some of these possibilities, but I can’t prepare for all of them.
And this is where things get frustrating. I understand that uncertainty is part of life. I’ve never seriously believed that every effort guarantees success. But understanding something and accepting it when your own future is involved are two different things.
It’s easy to say that rejection is normal until you’re the one who might lose money you had to think carefully about spending.
It’s easy to say that failure is part of learning until the opportunity you’re risking something for is one you genuinely care about.
I often hear people talk about taking chances as though courage is mainly about overcoming fear. Someone tells a story about moving abroad, starting a business, or making a difficult decision that eventually changed their life. Those stories can be encouraging. I like reading them too.
But I sometimes wonder about the stories we never hear.
What about the people who took a similar chance and didn’t succeed? The ones who worked just as hard, made sacrifices, and ended up having to start again? Their experiences are no less real simply because they don’t make particularly inspiring stories.
I think about that because I don’t want to convince myself that taking a risk automatically makes it worthwhile.
Some risks aren’t worth taking. Some opportunities cost more than they can reasonably offer, and sometimes the smartest thing you can do is admit that something is beyond your reach for now.
I don’t want to gamble with money I genuinely need just to prove that I’m ambitious.
At the same time, there’s another possibility that worries me.
What if I spend so much time protecting myself from the consequences of trying that I never seriously try at all?
Not because I lack ambition, or because I don’t care enough, but because every opportunity comes with uncertainty, and I keep waiting for one that doesn’t.
I can imagine how easily that could happen. Another year of preparation. Another list of universities. Another promise to myself that I’ll apply when my chances are better.
And sometimes waiting really is the sensible choice. I may need more time to strengthen my application or find an affordable route. I don’t think there’s anything shameful about that.
What bothers me is the possibility of reaching a point where I’m no longer preparing for an opportunity. I’m just avoiding the moment when I have to decide.
There is something strangely comfortable about leaving a possibility untouched. As long as I haven’t applied, I haven’t been rejected. I can still imagine that things might work out perfectly. The dream remains exactly as I want it to be.
Once I actually try, that changes.
Get Louzai houssem’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
I might receive good news. I might receive a rejection. I might discover that an opportunity I spent months thinking about isn’t financially possible after all.
The imagined future becomes a real experience, and real experiences don’t always give us the endings we wanted.
I suppose that’s the part of perfectionism I’m trying to understand. We sometimes become so attached to the best possible version of our future that we’re reluctant to accept an imperfect attempt to reach it.
Yet keeping every possibility open has a cost of its own.
Time passes whether we make a decision or not. Opportunities change. We change too. And there are things we can only learn by actually doing them, even when we’ve prepared as carefully as possible.
This doesn’t mean I should rush into applications or stop comparing my options. It means that eventually, preparation has to lead somewhere. Otherwise, I risk confusing the comfort of planning with the experience of moving forward.
Something else I’ve been questioning is the way we judge our decisions afterward.
If I apply to a university after careful consideration and receive a rejection, does that mean I made a bad decision?
I don’t think it necessarily does.
Maybe I had a reasonable chance and things simply didn’t work out. Maybe another applicant was stronger. Maybe the university had limited funding. There are factors I can try to understand, but not always control.
Of course, I could also make a genuine mistake. I might overlook a requirement or misunderstand an opportunity. If that happens, I’d want to learn from it.
But I don’t want to treat every disappointing outcome as proof that I should have known better.
We have a habit of looking at our past decisions with information we didn’t have when we made them. Once something goes wrong, it becomes easy to imagine that the better choice was obvious all along.
Usually, it wasn’t.
And not every loss comes with a valuable lesson either.
I know people like to say that nothing is wasted if you learn from it. I understand the intention, but sometimes that feels like asking too much of an experience.
If I lose money on an unsuccessful application, I might learn something about the process. I might become better prepared for the next attempt. But it’s also possible that I’ll learn very little and simply wish things had gone differently.
I think I should be allowed to feel disappointed about that without having to turn it into a story about personal growth.
Some losses are just losses.
Accepting that doesn’t make them less important. It only means I don’t have to spend forever searching for a reason they were supposed to happen.
I’ve been trying to think about my future with that in mind. I still want to study abroad, and I still find the idea exciting. I want to experience a different academic environment, meet people I might never encounter otherwise, and find out what I could learn from being somewhere unfamiliar.
But I’m also learning that a dream doesn’t become more meaningful simply because I’m willing to sacrifice everything for it.
There are limits I need to respect. I have to consider what I can afford, what I stand to gain, and what would happen if things didn’t go as planned.
I don’t want fear to stop me from pursuing reasonable opportunities. But I don’t want the fear of regret to pressure me into taking unreasonable ones either.
Somewhere between those two fears, I have to make my own decisions.
I don’t know exactly what that balance looks like yet. There are days when I’m confident about my plans and others when I question almost everything. Sometimes I find an opportunity that makes the future feel closer. Then I read another requirement or calculate another expense, and I’m reminded of how much still stands between me and that possibility.
I’m not particularly proud of how often I overthink these things. But I understand why I do.
This is my future I’m trying to figure out. And even if some of these decisions seem small from the outside, they don’t always feel small to me.
I sometimes imagine looking back on this period of my life years from now. I have no idea whether I’ll be studying somewhere abroad, working toward a completely different goal, or living a life that looks nothing like the one I’m planning today.
There are many possibilities, and I don’t know which one will become real.
I might regret an application that didn’t work out. I might wish I’d been more patient with a decision, or less hesitant about another. There will probably be things I could have handled better.
But I hope I won’t look back and realize that I let my fear of making mistakes decide everything for me.
I don’t need to try every opportunity. I don’t need to take risks I cannot afford, and I certainly don’t need to prove my determination by making life harder for myself.
I just want to give the possibilities that genuinely matter to me a fair chance, when I can do so responsibly.
Maybe that’s what I’m slowly learning about perfectionism. I don’t need to make the perfect decision. I need to make one I have thought through carefully enough, while accepting that I cannot know exactly how it will turn out.
That sounds simple when I write it down. I’m sure it will feel more complicated when the time comes to make an actual choice.
For now, I’ll probably keep researching universities, comparing requirements, and occasionally spending too long thinking about things I can’t control.
Some evenings, I’ll close my laptop feeling hopeful. Others, I’ll feel as though I haven’t gotten anywhere.
But I hope that little by little, I’ll become better at knowing when to keep preparing and when to give myself permission to try.
I don’t know where I’ll end up, and I don’t want to pretend that I’m certain everything will work out.
I’d just like to reach a point, years from now, where I can look back and say that I took my circumstances seriously, made the choices I reasonably could, and didn’t spend all my time waiting for a future that came with no possibility of disappointment.
