Your definition is too broad. Personal failure is a failure of being what you can be. You have pretty clearly articulated that whatever you are talking about is far in excess of what you can be. Being dwarfed by a role is not failure.
"Failure" as a self-applied term belongs in the realm of things you can *control.* If you realized your daughters had lice and didn't remove them all, or let them go to school infested, *that's* a failure on your part. If you invited sixteen people to a dinner party and didn't remember to cook--that's a failure. If you took too many course hours and made bad grades, if you forgot to drop a FedEx package off, if you misspelled words in a legal brief--those are failures.
Stepping away from a role you honestly cannot perform is not failure; it is responsibility. I submit that if you can't perform it sufficiently, your remaining there may be worse than freeing it for another to attempt. And another will turn up; or it will fall out that the role is not so vital to the sun rising as it seems.
Your problem is perception. You are allowing yourself to perceive yourself as a failure when the circumstances are beyond your control. Ask yourself--*why* are you clinging to this perception?
From one of my favorite awful books, a Christopher Stasheff volume in the Oathbound Wizard series, an abbess states to a redeemed witch, something along the lines of "All postulants think their sin the greatest ever done and will not look on a sister's face. Child, you know the folly of that--'tis foul pride's hidden side."
This is difficult to write--for I love what I know of you and hate asking the hard questions--and please feel free to tell me to shove it if I have gone too far--but you should stop experiencing the feeling of impending failure as an end in itself and seek the reasons you are making yourself experience it. Don't be trying to loom as large as a failure as you do as a Responsible Person; is there a reason to so punish yourself?
No.
"Failure" as a self-applied term belongs in the realm of things you can *control.* If you realized your daughters had lice and didn't remove them all, or let them go to school infested, *that's* a failure on your part. If you invited sixteen people to a dinner party and didn't remember to cook--that's a failure. If you took too many course hours and made bad grades, if you forgot to drop a FedEx package off, if you misspelled words in a legal brief--those are failures.
Stepping away from a role you honestly cannot perform is not failure; it is responsibility. I submit that if you can't perform it sufficiently, your remaining there may be worse than freeing it for another to attempt. And another will turn up; or it will fall out that the role is not so vital to the sun rising as it seems.
Your problem is perception. You are allowing yourself to perceive yourself as a failure when the circumstances are beyond your control. Ask yourself--*why* are you clinging to this perception?
From one of my favorite awful books, a Christopher Stasheff volume in the Oathbound Wizard series, an abbess states to a redeemed witch, something along the lines of "All postulants think their sin the greatest ever done and will not look on a sister's face. Child, you know the folly of that--'tis foul pride's hidden side."
This is difficult to write--for I love what I know of you and hate asking the hard questions--and please feel free to tell me to shove it if I have gone too far--but you should stop experiencing the feeling of impending failure as an end in itself and seek the reasons you are making yourself experience it. Don't be trying to loom as large as a failure as you do as a Responsible Person; is there a reason to so punish yourself?
~Amanda, wondering whether to hit "Post Comment"