Congratulations to Francois Ngoma for Winning the September 2026 Barefoot Writing Challenge! (Your $100 prize is on its way!)
The challenge was to write an essay that answered this prompt:
What has being a Barefoot Writer made possible in your life that you didn’t expect when you first began, and what would you tell the writer who is standing where you once stood?
Francois shared a relatable experience of trying and failing and then… well, you’ll just have to read his winning submission to discover the amazing thing that happened on the other side!
The Veil
by Francois Ngoma
I was supposed to be the best student in my class. Not one of the best — the best. So, when I learned that I had failed the first session of my degree and would have to sit for a second, remedial session, I didn’t feel sadness. I felt disbelief.
This wasn’t supposed to happen to someone like me.
For days, a veil settled over my eyes: thin, invisible, but heavy enough to blur everything I thought I knew about myself. I told myself the grading had been unfair, that I had simply had a bad day, that the second session was only a formality.
But underneath those excuses was something simpler: I was ashamed.
The veil made me believe that trying again would mean admitting I had never been as good as I thought.
That’s when my mother gave me a different way of seeing what had happened.
Discouragement, she told me, is like a veil. It falls over your eyes when you fail and makes you believe the path ahead has disappeared. But the path is still there. The veil doesn’t erase it. It only hides it.
“The only way to see the path again,” she told me, “is to keep walking even when you can’t see.”
I didn’t fully understand her then. I was too busy protecting my pride, too focused on the veil to realize that I could move forward through it.
But a few days before the second session, her words came back to me.
I made a decision that had nothing to do with talent and everything to do with will.
I would sit down. I would open my books. I would prepare — not as the best student in the class, but as someone willing to keep walking even when he couldn’t see the road ahead.
I passed the second session.
But what I remember most isn’t the grade. It’s the moment the veil lifted.
It didn’t lift because I had proved I was the best. It lifted because I had refused to stop. I stopped seeing the second session as proof that I wasn’t good enough and began seeing it as another step on the road.
I had fallen. I had been ashamed. For a while, I couldn’t see clearly.
But I kept walking.
Since then, the veil has returned many times in my career, in projects I believed in and nearly abandoned, and in moments when starting over felt harder than giving up.
Whenever it returns, I remember my mother’s words.
The veil lies. It makes you believe the road has disappeared when it is still there, waiting for you.
That is the most valuable lesson my mother ever taught me, not through a lecture, but through a few quiet words when I needed them most:
Failure is not the end of the road. Sometimes, it is only a veil.
And when the veil falls, you don’t have to see the whole path.
You only have to keep walking.
