Advanced Placement, not A Punishment

Its AP season. I know. I get it. You know how I know? Less people sleep, more people cry, everyone is on their last nerve, and nobody can hang out with friends because they are all studying.
I hate AP testing. Not because of the tests themselves, I can handle that. Not because of the studying that goes into them, I can handle that (if I do it at all). It is the freaking out that so many students do over the test. A test is, first and foremost, supposed to be an exploration into what it is that you remember and understand from the past year, testing not your ability to spit back information, but rather to assess whether or not the class was valuable in education.
Why, then, do so many people lose sleep, lose patience, and lose fun when the big bad test comes into view?
The reason for this, I think, is because of the society in which we live. So much focus is put on academic excellence. We have to get an A on everything. We have to take the highest level courses. We have to do as much schoolwork and extracurricular activities as we can possibly pack into one day, and not give any thought to what will keep us moving.
Where did we get this "Failure is not an option" attitude? I read, in English class, an article written by a writer, William Zinssler, who said that we, as people, have "a right to fail." This right has, however, been slowly taken away from us.
Failure does not, or rather should not, carry the negative connotation that it most often has. If we do not occasionally fail, how will we ever learn? We are told to learn from our mistakes, but how can we do this if we are not allowed to MAKE them?
I believe, in a society where we are taught that failure is not an option, the only people who tell us we are not allowed to fail are also the ones doing the failing. When a school tells us we cannot fail by stressing grades and making standards that are unachievable, they are failing to instill the ability for their students to learn from their experiences, both good and bad. When parents tell their children that they cannot fail and set ridiculous grade quotas, they are not instilling the values that are necessary for human life: The ability to fail, get back in the game, and succeed despite previous failure.
OK, I get it. I may not be the most popular AP student anymore. I am not accepting the breakneck attitude of kamikazeing my way to the test. Because guess what? There will always be a new test. There will always be a new bench mark, a new goal. If I can just stay up all night studying for ONE MORE TEST, I can finally relax. Unfortunately, when someone has this attitude for too long, it begs the question: When? When will you relax, take a deep breath, and enjoy just being a kid? Never. If you waste the few years of teenage life that we have on studying, we won't ever be able to look back and enjoy our past. We SHOULD study, we SHOULD set goals, but we should never let them contaminate our lives to the point where we don't have anything more to live for than just the next benchmark.
Stop. Right now. You may have a test tomorrow, or the next day, or the next. But it doesn't matter. In ten years, it won't matter how you did on an AP French test. It will matter if you lived your life to the fullest, and had the best life you could have had.