| Thank you so much for making this comment. I would be beyond happy if this is helpful to you. A few other thoughts on the subject of the paragraph that resonated with you. A yoga teacher told me a long time ago to draw a distinction between how I feel and what I am. In English, we say "I am angry" or "I am sad" etc. - where our words literally describe us being that emotion. A more useful frame is "I have an anger", "I have a sadness" etc. It acknowledges that you may have a feeling but that feeling does not define you. Basically, the recognition that how you feel isn't reality. Further reinforcing this point is the idea that we acknowledge that feelings can be inappropriate. EG: if someone loses their shit in anger over something trivial, we don't go "wow this is clearly a bigger issue that we thought", we just say this person is overreacting. Or if someone is anxious about something benign like flying or public speaking, we don't say "oh those must be really dangerous things", we say "it's unfortunate that this anxiety is limiting you and making you unhappy." Likewise I think with failure. Failure in general is a bad thing - if you fuck up that can have real bad consequences for you and your community, so it makes sense for fucking up to feel bad. But reality is that most failure isn't material in this way (you and everyone are fine) but it can still feel as if it was. So recognizing that just like anger or fear can be obviously disproportionate to the stimulus, so can this feeling. Having that perspective is an important step towards keeping it in context and diminishing the sting. Another thing is to realize that your failure is contextualized to a calculated risk you chose to take on. You decided that interviewing for ambitious jobs (in this example) should make your life better eventually. The fact that you decided to do that is a success. The fact that you then failed at a particular interview is totally within success criteria of the larger endeavor. In general, there's something to be said for not taking ones' self too serious. The fact that you think or feel something is the beginning of the story, not the end. I find that a lot of religious growth comes from/entails recognizing that "just because you want/feel/fear/etc something - that's not the end-all-be-all" This is probably now too much vs what you will find useful but I wanted to share! |