What You Say

So I have this nasty tendency to be really down on myself when I mess up, or fail in some way, or do something I should know better about. You'd be amazed how much of that bile actually bubbles over into my dealing with other people.

It's not a bad thing to hold yourself to standards, but what do you do when you don't live up to them? I don't want to give myself carte blanche permission to just let myself off the hook whenever I screw up ("Oh well, that's just you, it's all right!"). I mean, how do you ever improve that way?

On the other hand, I'm not really into the idea of punishing myself for fucking up; my overall mood sours and I'm not as interested in treating other people fairly when this happens. I'd much rather handle my disappointment in a way that doesn't involve other people. One of the ways I can avoid such an outcome is to not disappoint myself in the first place, which I've been working on but is so much easier said than done. It always seems like the small victories eventually get overshadowed by the more common failures.

I suppose one of the things I could do is throw myself into discerning the reasons behind the failures. If I know what went wrong a bit more intimately then I can devise a plan to avoid a repeat of the incident. Maybe that'll work.

Anyway, the weekend's been busy, and the next two weekends promise to be about as bad.

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