Entry 626 — Fear of Failure
I’ve always had a horrible fear of failure. I was thinking about that just now as I tried to steel myself to go to war with the Russians. I’m Greece in a round of Civilization, the world-domination game I spend such an absurd amount of time playing against my computer. My spies, who are almost always right, tell me the Russians are very weak, and there are other strong indications that I will win a war against them. Since I’m slightly ahead of the other nations I’m competing with, that should be enough for me to win the game as a whole. And, good grief, no one will know but I if I fail! Yet I feel the same way I feel in a tennis match I’m playing in the local seniors league, or when I’m about to submit a poem somewhere. I’m reminded, too, of the way school tests made me feel, even ones I knew would be no problem for me. Oddly, I don’t much feel it with these blog entries of mine. I don’t know why that should be. I’m submitting specimens of my thinking to strangers. I guess the fact that my judges are invisible, mute, and few keeps me from thinking about them. Another factor I just thought of is that no one is keeping score, there’s no definite way I can fail. Well, unless a few of you made nasty comments about my entries all of a sudden. But nobody has for ever so long.
Happy pills or alcohol would probably solve the problem. Unfortunately, anything that would make awareness of failure impossible would also make awareness of success impossible, too. My temperament is such that irrational hope of success will always trump equally irrational fear of failure, for me. Even though my greatest feelings of success have been of anticipated success, almost never of actual success.
Note: after I posted this, I felt a sense of triumph. That made me realize a trick I learned so long ago that I use it automatically without thinking about it: giving oneself games to play that are almost impossible to lose, in this case, my game of getting a blog entry done every day. That’s a great lesson for those of you looking for terrific self-help methods!
.
