Only school can make an accomplished man feel like a worthless moron.
There comes a point in every journey...a point where you're so close to completing that journey that you can already taste it's sweet rewards. Yet, whatever the reason may be, you've never felt further from attaining your goal than at that very moment.
It can be some great catastrophe, some grand failure; something that's on such a scale you cant deny how bad it is. Or, worse than that, it can be the most minute thing that sets it off. At that point, in those circumstances, the only thing you have left to do is question, wonder, ponder and beat yourself up over what has happened.
You cant change anything, you know that much, but you still wonder if maybe there was some minute errors that could tip things in your favour...possibly make that bad situation a little better. You question how you could have been so stupid...after all, you knew what you were doing. You sit and mull over the same results over and over and you weigh the consequences of those results until your brain hurts. When it's all said and done and you've simply accepted your fate, all that's left is to feel the pain of the inability to fix things.
Our entire civilization is built up around the fact that dreams DO come true and all you have to do is work hard enough and your dreams will become reality...but the sad truth is that it's all just statistics and sensationalized press. For every person who makes it big in their field, there are countless people, with just as much passion and determination, who fail horribly. But no one wants to hear about those sad bastards, we only want the sugar coated sweets that make us sigh and say aloud, in our perfect little worlds, that "aint life grand?".
So you roll with the punches and keep on going, but your view of things and yourself is forever changed. Forever you're looking back at that moment with self-sustaining disappointment and you're forever making decisions based on those disappointments. And in the end, you'll know it's all just part of becoming your own final product, but not every story has a happy ending, and so you continue with your disappointments and your decisions.
