Failure and Fear

Whoever it was who told me that your love life, work life and home life can never all be good at once – I think it was a fellow temp back in the dark days of doing the filing other people couldn’t be bothered with – seems to have been right. Unfortunately.

So, my love life’s not going too badly at the moment and I’m feeling at home in my (rented) flat just now, which leaves one thing to be a disaster. Until recently I was so, so happy at work, I enjoyed my job, liked my colleagues, and everything was going to plan. I’d stormed my way through multiple training courses and exams for work and it seemed like things were firmly on the up. Then came the course I couldn’t pass. The first time I took it I failed by such a narrow margin that it was unthinkable that the next time would be a problem. I jumped through all the hoops I needed to, to get another go. The second time I sailed through just the way I was expected to, right up until the last minute, when the tiniest of mistakes saw me failing again. The fact that it caused huge arguments amongst the assessors, with a majority actually voting for me to pass but being outranked by the course leader, was of no comfort to me at all. I drove home that night absolutely devastated, feeling sick with failure and fear of what would come next.

Back at work I did my best to shrug it off, joking about it with colleagues and acting like I was fine. Two months have passed now, people have got used to my failure and they believe I’m fine. The management are doing their best to get me onto yet another course and my colleagues couldn’t have been nicer about it. I go there and I smile every day but inside the fear and the shame are ever present, niggling away and making absolutely everything in my life seem a little bit dimmer. It’s compounded by the fact that there’s no one I can talk to about it. My friends from outside the job don’t get it, they can’t understand, and I can’t talk to my friends from work about it precisely because they do understand, and I can’t stand the sympathy in their eyes. Even without the question of understanding, the overwhelming shame at my failure makes talking to anyone at all about it impossible.

So I’m floundering about, terrified of what the future holds for my work life. I’m too old to start all over again at something else, but if I can’t make it on my chosen career path what else can I do? I feel like I’ve wasted so much time, I’ve worked so hard and I have literally nothing to show for it. My flat is rented, my savings are meagre and my skills really aren’t that transferable. I’m terrified and embarrassed and I want to go to bed for a year and not have to face anybody. I’m 32 years old, there’s no husband or kids on the scene, I should at least have a decent career surely?! Without that what am I exactly? Just one major screw up of a woman, who can’t make a success of anything. It is grim!

I suppose the one saving grace is that my life has tipped over into disaster in so many areas, so many times, that I do have one really useful skill – I’m exceptional at hiding the internal panic and carrying on, telling myself over and over again that this too, shall pass. So a magic solution must be going to turn up sometime soon. I hope.