When I was a teenager, the father of a family I lived with for a while used to start singing the Rolling Stones’ "You can’t always get what you want" when I, or one of his children, threw a tantrum after hearing the word "no" – often leading to lots of eye-rolling or even larger tantrums.

We all make mistakes or face setbacks. Even the most successful people do – apparently it took Thomas Edison more than a thousand attempts to make a lightbulb. Actors audition for decades to make a Hollywood breakthrough later in life.

Nor is it a secret that life throws all of us a curveball. Some of them we share – the Covid-19 pandemic, the cost of living crisis (although both, arguably, each still impacted many of us differently).

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Others are more personal. They are challenges that often happen behind closed doors and away from social media timelines.

I had to do some forced reflecting on my own such successes and failures recently in the build-up to a student journalism conference hosted in Glasgow last weekend.

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For it, I was asked to share my experiences and advice on getting into journalism after university and writing for student publications, alongside a panel of three other journalists.

The timing of the talk was strange. It reminded me of what I felt pretty much exactly a year ago, when I was just about to finish my last assignments and dissertation; ready to graduate in the next month.

It was a time filled with excitement. I had just got a job as a reporter; something which I had worked towards over the last four years. But it was also a time of uncertainty – uncertainty whether I had made the right decision; what life would look like away from academia, the routine of lectures and seminars, and life as I’d known it.

University, in a way, had been a buffer against "the real world". Of course, I always knew that being there had a purpose and that this time would eventually end. But my focus was always geared towards achieving two end results in the short term – graduating and finding a job.

Once achieved, I was left wondering what I really wanted my long-term plans to be. The world was filled with options but so much so that I was left wondering which would be the right ones to find not just what I wanted, but what I needed to be happy. Alongside my concerns was the constant stream of "job klaxons" and "personal news" of others progressing in their field that filled my social media timeline.

Graduation anxiety and comparing yourself to others is not a new phenomenon. In a survey conducted prior to the pandemic, student mental health charity Student Minds discovered that nearly half of all ex-students questioned said their mental wellbeing declined after graduating. They also found that many expressed concerns they were not doing well enough  – 44 per cent said they felt their friends were doing better than them.

What experts say helps mitigate these concerns – aside from taking frequent breaks from social media to avoid the endless comparison to others – is to talk to peers to discover that, despite what social media may make you think, they too will be facing their own challenges.

I recently made the decision to leave a role I was in. It is not a decision I regret; it was necessary for me and my wellbeing, and while it created a lot of questions in terms of how I will be moving forward, it also opened new avenues. In the long run, it has made me more confident and aware of myself.

What had helped me to even make the choice was other people sharing their similar experiences with me. I got to hear that they too, even in their success, did not follow a linear path to get to where they are or did so without challenges.

Yet, when it came to me talking about my experiences with the audience of students – people who potentially are facing similar questions as to what path to choose after graduating; just as I did last year – I noticed my fear in sharing exactly this unplanned sidestep in my career trajectory.

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One main reason was that nagging feeling that others are doing better. All I had to go by was the descriptions of the other panellists, detailing their work and achievements. Suddenly, the thought of sharing my experience beside what I saw as people who have achieved greater things made me feel terrified.

However, I did talk about both my successes and failures in the end. Why? It came about through talking to the other panellists ahead of the event. Over coffee, we poured over what we were planning to say. Hearing that their experiences were not free from challenges either, I realised that there is no one "right" way to do it.

All of this is not to say I don’t want to see achievements shared (the opposite really!). Despite the adverse effect reading "personal news" and "job klaxons" can have, I love seeing people around me achieve great things. I love celebrating them. I just wish there was more of a balance and that we all would feel less scared about sharing when things don’t go as planned.

Our successes are what we share and rightfully so. However, the route to them is hardly ever linear. Life doesn’t always go to plan and it is the process of trial and error which can teach us so much about not only what we want but what we need.

These setbacks and curveballs can be just as shaping as our successes – and I think we should speak about them more.

Being more transparent about it all not only demystifies the process and helps make certain industries more accessible to people. It also gives insight and empowerment that the way forward might include walking backwards, sideways, and in circles first — and that that’s okay.

Daniella Theis is Scottish Student Journalist of the Year