Tag: Fear of failure

Still Waters – #Autistic December 5/31

Still Waters – #Autistic December 5/31

by alexforshaw ♥ 1 Comment

Still waters run deep

If I had a penny for every time I heard that phrase growing up…

My school reports are year after year of consistently high academic performance and hopes that I might participate more and develop socially. I was lucky to have a natural inclination and ability for learning: it compensated for and allowed me to “get away with” being socially awkward.

…consistently impressing with her quiet, conscientious approach and with the high standard of all her work.

Form Master, Midsummer Term 1989

A first-class report. […] She is very modest about her ability and must make sure she does not under-sell herself at interview next year.

Form Master, Midsummer Term 1990

Her consistent performances are exceptional. If she can develop her inter-personal skills more fully she will do very well indeed.

Headmaster, Midsummer Term 1991

You see, if I’d not been so capable academically my poor social skills would likely have been seen as more significant. As it was, doing well in my studies meant that my difficulties in other areas were overlooked or glossed over.

I said I was lucky, but the fact is that the highly-structured world of school masked the significant trouble I had navigating an environment like university that relied much more heavily on interactions with other people. My lack of a social network left me isolated and lacking the support I needed, and because I’d not been in any similar situations before I had no idea how to cope.

It left me with deep feelings of failure and shame: everyone had expected me to do well because that is what I had always done. I had tied my own measurement of my worth to that feedback, to those reports of how well I performed.

I let them all down.

I expected to face rejection: after all, I was valued for how well I did and I had just failed. It’s hard to explain how powerful the fear of rejection was, how ashamed I felt of failing.

How worthless I felt.

The echoes of that are still present, still affect me to this day. That was the point at which I shattered into the broken pieces that I work so hard to hold together.

I can mouth the empty words, say that I am worth something, but I don’t believe it. At heart I know I’m a failure: the proof’s there plain to see.

Those still waters, they really do run as deep as they say. And who knows what truly lies beneath that calm surface? For me it’s the wreck of the promise I once showed.

Unintended Consequences

Unintended Consequences

by bjforshaw ♥ 2 Comments

It’s very difficult to admit that you are in the wrong. Especially if the misdeed was not an intentional act but a consequence of natural behavior.

With impeccable timing under the circumstances I read this blog post over the weekend. It was like looking into a mirror – and I don’t mean that everything appeared back-to-front! It was as if the writer had looked into my mind, seen inside as if it were crystal. I’m no stranger to recognizing aspects of myself in other Aspie blog posts: that goes with the territory. But occasionally I read something that could have been written about me. Which is kind of why I’m writing this now.

It doesn’t matter exactly what happened over the weekend. But what made it worse was my failure to apologize in a timely manner. You see, I started out thinking that because I hadn’t intentionally done anything to cause hurt then I couldn’t have done anything wrong and the other person must be behaving irrationally. I’d forgotten about unintended consequences.

To truly be responsible for one’s actions means accepting responsibility for all the effects, both intentional and unintentional, expected and unexpected, desirable and undesirable. And realizing that even unconscious, unplanned, unavoidable acts are included in this – accidents do happen.

“I never meant to…” is an excuse. It’s a valid excuse as far as it goes, but that’s not far enough. “It’s my fault” is better. I might not have been able to foresee the results of my actions, or even avoid doing it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t regret what happened. Accidents have causes. In this case I didn’t communicate early or clearly enough that I was approaching a crisis. It’s like being too busy defusing a ticking bomb to evacuate the surroundings in time. I had too narrow a focus on what was happening internally to think about anybody outside. And that was a mistake. There were consequences that meant the problems were more severe and lasted longer.

And so to the apology. I’m sure some people can say sorry and convey the appropriate sincerity regardless of whether or not they feel remorse. I can’t. If I’m going to apologize then I’ve got to understand that I did something wrong and regret it. Admit to myself first that I was wrong. That’s hard.

In some ways I had an easy life growing up. I had a natural gift for the subjects I studied in school and regularly achieved top marks with little effort. I got the “gifted” label early and it stuck. I enjoyed the plaudits. But the down side is that the more used you get to success, the worse failure appears. It makes you risk-averse: you avoid choosing the path of uncertainty because you have become afraid of the possibility of failure, of getting something wrong. In some ways being labelled as gifted is a curse: you’re only as good as your last [excellent] result. It made me happy, sure, but it made me awfully insecure at the same time. I identified with the label to such an extent that I felt that losing it would destroy who I was.

Admitting I got something wrong equates to admitting I failed. To accept being less than perfect. (Yes, I know intellectually I’m not perfect and I make mistakes but I don’t feel it – there’s still that belief that I have to achieve perfection just to keep on being myself.) I try so hard to get past this but it’s always there, like rails preventing me from changing direction. I still look for praise in what I do and dread censure: it’s made me a perfectionist, never satisfied with what I create because I concentrate on the flaws. It’s a never-ending school report with just the comment “could do better”.

So… it takes me time to get to the point where I feel able to admit that I’ve done wrong and apologize. Please bear with me and be patient.

I’m doing my best.

Anxiety: Learning to Cope

Anxiety: Learning to Cope

by bjforshaw ♥ 5 Comments

Nobody Home?

It’s the strangest feeling, or it would be if it weren’t so familiar. I catch myself playing the part, acting “normal”, carrying on without conscious intervention while all the time I’m there, watching. I feel like a spectator in my own body, a mere passenger.

I remain aware of everything around me, fully linked to my senses, but my mind is free-wheeling, pursuing lines of thought unrelated to what my body is doing. And every so often I notice that my body has been walking around, even talking to people, while I’ve been occupied with my thoughts.

Role Playing

I guess it’s a form of acting: I’m performing a role that I’ve rehearsed so thoroughly I don’t need to think about what I’m doing, leaving my mind free to wander. This is the state in which I’m most at ease: there is a comfortable familiarity as I run along the rails of routine.

Am I a Stereotype?

The trouble is… as I watch myself I wonder whether I am being myself or whether I am merely exhibiting a set of learned behaviors with the aim of fitting in. What makes me suspect this? I get little nudges from my conscience – a feeling that I should be, say, flapping my hands or talking at length and in detail about some topic of personal interest. Things I used to do as a child but have suppressed as I’ve grown.

Since discovering that I have Aspergers I have become more aware that a number of things I used to do instinctively were characteristic of the condition. I see my innate Aspie traits on one side of a balance with my acquired “normal” traits on the other, and as one side rises into prominence the other side sinks from view. I’ve been feeling more and more that I am out of balance and I need to take corrective action to restore the equilibrium.

I’ve found that whereas in the past I had been led into thinking of my differences as aberrant behaviors to be corrected, I now consider them to be natural aspects of the way I am. I have accepted that I’m different – and the reasons underlying that – and I try to be more myself rather than struggling to “act normal”. That said, there are some areas where my instinctive reactions are a hindrance to living independently: it’s not possible to go through life without interacting with strangers at some point.

Identity and Self-confidence

My sense of self – my identity – is moderately strong: I know who I am and my core values are well-established in my mind. I might not always have the strength or confidence to actively uphold them but I find that I am incapable of acting against them. My self-confidence on the other hand varies according to the situation from bulletproof to non-existent. And that’s where my anxiety creeps in.

The Sum of All Fears

First a bit of background: there is a psychological theory of learning usually referred to as “The Four Stages of Competence”. Briefly, the four stages are:

  1. Unconscious incompetence where you are not aware of your lack of a skill.
  2. Conscious incompetence in which you become aware that you do not understand or know the skill.
  3. Conscious competence which is having the knowledge but not grokking it: knowing a sequence of steps and able to follow the sequence but without fluency. One still has to think heavily about the task.
  4. Unconscious competence where practice – rehearsal – has made the skill so familiar that it has become habit and little or no conscious effort is required to perform it.

What I described at the start is stage 4: I’m doing things that are so familiar I don’t have to think about them and my conscious thoughts can drift off. Problems arise for me at stages 2 and 3 where I come face to face with the unknown.

When I am faced with a situation that is unfamiliar or where I can’t predict what turns events may take I become anxious. I lack self-confidence in my ability to perform the task, whether it is making a phone call or interacting with strangers. I know I can manage well-defined, structured interactions such as ordering a pizza or going to the doctor because I have become familiar with the routines involved: I am around stages 3-4 in those cases. But with something that is off-the-wall where I would have to react according to the context I find myself back at stage 2 where I am all too aware that I don’t really know what to do.

Breaking the Circle

At the moment I find myself trapped in a vicious circle where I have evolved strategies of avoidance when faced with anxiety-inducing situations. This prevents me gaining the experience to deal with similar situations in the future, and results in greater anxiety if I can’t avoid them. I recently raised this problem with my GP and I’ve started a course of therapy to try to manage my fears so that they don’t continue to be an obstacle to me doing things.

Square One

One of the first tasks has been to analyze the roots of my anxiety: what triggers it, what is it I am afraid of? Many people have a fear of judgement: what will the other person think of them? But that’s not it for me. My core fear is of failure, of not being able to complete the task. Fears of this kind in particular can affect people who grew up with a “gifted” label as I did. A lack of experience of failing makes any failure, however small, appear catastrophic. This leads to risk aversion, a strong drive to avoid the possibility of failure. Perhaps if I can learn to accept failure than I will be able to attempt things where I lack confidence. I can hope.