I’ve Failed/I’m Stuck

Posted by fxckfeelings on April 15, 2009

Today’s cases are a double helping of people who feel like they’ve ruined their lives; one curses a bad choice, the other a character flaw, but both have made the bigger mistake of not being able to evaluate what failure actually means. It’s not that their lives can be 100% fixed, but they’re not 100% broken, either.

-Dr. Lastname

When I was in my teens, I decided to become a priest, because I really believed the priesthood would make my life complete. I fully immersed myself in the church, lost touch with all my friends, and spent the next ten years studying at the seminary, training in the religious life. The more I learned, however, the more I began to question the church’s teaching, and this made a lot of my peers and superiors anxious and annoyed. Eventually, I became disillusioned and finally decided to leave, but I had no idea what I was truly giving up. My oldest friends have educated themselves, found partners, and settled down, while I’m back living with my parents, having acquired no marketable skills and alienated myself from all my friends in the priesthood. You don’t need to lose God to feel like you’ve missed out on life late in the game. I feel I’ve failed myself. My goal is to fix this mess I’ve made of my life.

If your goal in becoming a priest was to be happy, then I can see why you regard yourself as a failure, because, in spite of a huge effort lasting many years, you quit the priesthood and are as unhappy as you’ve ever been, so congrats, the results of this critical decision couldn’t possibly be more negative or disappointing. On the bright side, there are better reasons for wanting to be a priest that have nothing to do with being happy or getting good results. Perhaps you wanted to be a priest because you believe in making the world a better place by helping others and making sacrifices, and, if that’s the case, how can you possibly be a failure?

A sad fact of life is that you can dedicate many years to learning a trade, honing your skills, building a business, and then get wiped out. And whether it happens because you made a mistake or because of conditions totally beyond your control, you’ll tend to feel like you blew it, because that’s the way our nervous systems shape our thinking. If things end painfully, we wonder what went wrong, how we could have done it better, and who made the mistake, but the truth is that success stories have the same lead up, just with a happier ending. As ever, it’s dangerous to pay too much attention to the ending, because life, in its infinite randomness and unfairness, puts bad endings on good efforts all the time.

It’s tempting, as an idealist, to judge yourself against ideal standards, and that’s why idealists often make mean and nasty judges. Instead, judge yourself the way you would judge a friend. Did you make a good effort? Did you have good motives? Did you make sacrifices? Don’t you have more respect for someone who sacrifices for a good cause and winds up with no pleasure, recognition, or accomplishment than for luckier people who get great results?

So forget about how bad it feels to have no profession, no friends, and no money; that happens to many brave people who take the most daring risks because of their love of an ideal or dream. It’s an unavoidable side-effect, but it doesn’t mean that you’ve made a mistake or that your future is doomed. What you did, over all those years, was consistent with your values: you didn’t fail yourself; your sacrifices served a good cause; and, you learned from the experience. Amen.

STATEMENT:
It may help you to compose a self-assessment that will stand up to the bombardment of negative judgments coming from the cerebral Nucleus of Unhappy Feelings and Bum Results. “I know I’m poor, unhappy, and lonely and my efforts to become a priest ended in disappointment. But I also know that I had good reasons, tried hard, and followed good values, so I have much to be proud of. I intend to follow the same values into whatever I do next. People may see me as a loser who made a lot of mistakes. I don’t see it that way and I won’t talk about it that way with anyone, ever, including myself.”

I’ve been a dedicated actor since high school, and sometimes I’ve even been able to make a living at it, but I’m shy, and since I’ve never been able to network very well, the work comes in dribs and drabs. I fell into a flexible, secretarial day job that gives me time to audition, but it doesn’t pay much. My wife is always on me to get off my ass and do something, but I don’t, which makes her furious. So here I am, half of my life gone, I haven’t accomplished much and just don’t seem to do much with my time. I should try to make more money, do more with my acting, or try harder to find friends, but I don’t. I’m so passive. I’m usually depressed and lonely and I hate myself. My goal is to get going.

My guess is that you’re not lazy, and that’s the bad news. If only you were lazy, you could get yourself going by throwing yourself into desperate situations or finding a tough taskmaster or something you really cared about doing. What worries me is that you sound like someone who is very motivated and still can’t get going, and frankly, that’s bad. That means you may have something neurologically wrong with your brain that prevents you from self-starting regardless of the task or situation.

Scientifically speaking, yes, that is possible; the brain’s executive functions are vulnerable to subtle but crippling damage from many things, including severe childhood trauma or repeated bouts of depression, mania, or disturbed thinking. There’s no way yet to confirm this possibility with medical tests, but if you find that you can’t get going under lots of conditions, even when you have good reason to care deeply about what you’re doing, that’s my bet.

There may well have been occasions when you didn’t have this problem, and you might argue that that proves you can overcome it if you wanted to and that it isn’t “real.” Don’t be so sure. Sometimes, fear-stimulated adrenalin will shift your brain into higher gear, but you can’t make that happen at will unless you can regularly scare yourself silly, which is harder to do as you get older and more jaded.

You might argue it doesn’t help to let yourself off the hook, but how are you off the hook knowing that a disability makes something harder for you to accomplish, with less certainty of success, and yet you still need to do it? Life never lets you off the hook, it just makes some hooks nastier than others.

If I’m right, you should stop whipping yourself to get going, because you’ll fail, hate yourself, and convince your loved ones that you’re a lazy fuck-up. Then you’ll get nagged and blamed, do even less, get depressed, sap your energy, and keep a therapist busy to no good effect. So let’s put aside the dangerous goal of getting going—which is dangerous because you don’t control it—and think instead of something more constructive, like doing your best to get going, within the limits of your abilities on any given day. In a nutshell, the bad news is, you’re fucked, but the good news is you didn’t do it to yourself, and there’s lots you can do about it.

Actually, you’ve probably been doing a lot of good things about it throughout your life. You’ve pursued acting and gotten some meaningful jobs, kept a marriage going, and probably learned tricks for keeping busy and staying organized. Plus, you’ve done it with a motor that can’t shift out of first gear. Some people have tremendous energy, and everyone admires what they accomplish, but it’s more impressive to accomplish something meaningful when your energy allotment is minimal. Even if you feel vastly inferior.

STATEMENT:
If you agree that you have less control over this problem than you thought, (and this is ultimately your call to make), you might want to prepare a rational self-assessment to counter your feelings of frustration and self-loathing. “I’ve done far less than I would wish or expect and far less than others have accomplished. But I know how hard I’ve tried and I haven’t given up. I’ve tried to do what’s important, regardless of how long it took me, how discouraged I got, or how poorly my results compared to others’. And if I haven’t, then I will. If I disappoint my friends or family and they believe I could do better, I’m sorry. I disappoint me. But, as long as I’ve done my best, I will not share their belief that I’ve failed. I’ve done little and yet, knowing what it cost me, I’m proud. If they want to tell me what I’m doing wrong, I will tell them that we must disagree and close the conversation. ”