Answer: Present Perfect
Use the present perfect for the amount of time up to the moment of speaking that you've done an action. Use the past simple to express the starting point in time.
I believe it's the sentence <span>Then my stubborn streak kicked in, and I decided that failure wasn’t an option.</span><span>
The "Then" part shows that there was some introduction to it, that something preceded this sentence - a story about trying to do something and failing. Also, we learn that the speaker was going to do something about it, to try harder and succeed eventually, and we are expecting to read about that later in the essay.</span>
The answer is definitly going to be c, trust me on this one!