Barb Gamble sits quietly in her leather chair, eyes following the movement of the construction men outside the window.

She spends her days helping people, listening to them talk about themselves and helping them to further understand themselves. It’s a difficult job, but according to Gamble, “It is the best job anybody could ever imagine. I love my work and [I] never mind going to work in the morning because each person I see is interesting and it’s always meaningful, and [it’s] never boring. And I’m always learning.”

Gamble has been practicing psychotherapy for almost eight years. Psychotherapy is a much more analytical form of therapy, using psychological means to help solve mental health issues rather than medical means. She finds her work to be more on the psychodynamic side than purely clinical. According to Gamble, psychodynamics is an important part of understanding the human psyche, saying: “basically, the theory is that everything we experience in our lives has meaning for who we are today. That everything is grounded in experiences that we’ve had before, so it digs for meaning.”

Unfortunately, the ride to finding her dream career has been rather bumpy.

Gamble graduated college with a degree in psychobiology, a field that no longer exists after it was absorbed into the field of neuroscience. She applied to clinical psychology school after her graduation, but was rejected from every single program. “When I got rejected from all the programs I applied to, I thought, “I’m just not smart enough to do this, and I’m going to have to pick a different choice for my life,”” Gamble said. “I accepted it as an evaluation of my worth as a human being, and that was really discouraging and upsetting. I thought the doors were just closed.”

Gamble says that she regrets simply giving up on clinical psych school, though she applied and got in nearly twenty-five years later. She wishes she hadn’t taken that rejection as the final answer. When she was rejected, she didn’t have anyone telling her that she shouldn’t give up, that this wasn’t the end of her journey and all she needed to do was reapply.

“I think that the moral of that story is: when you hit a wall, look around for another path,” Gamble says. “Don’t accept it as the final option, because that’s hard.”

Before reapplying and following her dream, Gamble spent her time expanding her experience in the world of psychology. She worked at Allen Creek Preschool, focusing on child development, observing how the children grew and how they changed. Gamble said that the experience was like participating in her own developmental psychology lab, and that it cemented her knowledge of wanting to work with children. She even had the opportunity to observe the development of children to adults through the parents, saying that “everyone was a kid once.”

“When I decided to get my clinical psych degree, I felt like, “finally! I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do and nothing is going to stop me,”” Gamble said when talking about her decision to go back to school. Though it took her twenty-five years to finally reach for her goal again, this time she was sure and she believed in herself enough to face the possibility of failure once again.

But, Gamble wasn’t always so sure of what she wanted. When she first started her undergraduate degree she thought she might major in math or music, in fact psychology was barely a blip on her radar. Then, during her junior year, Gamble finally declared psychobiology as her major. “I figured it out by looking at the classes that were most interesting to me and picking the major that I almost had already without really realizing it,” Gamble laughed.

Overall, Gamble has found that the real lesson she’s learned from this whole journey is that you don’t accept failure. “You get up and you don’t take it personally,” Gamble said. This is a very hard lesson to learn, because no one likes failure, no one wants to think about their failures. Gamble is an example of how this lesson can change your life, how you can go from absolutely defeated to chasing your dream, all you need is to believe in yourself and your abilities.