I feel I was placed on this earth (and to renew my Ask Polly subscription) to give you insight. I, too, have struggled obsessively with the same question obsessing you, this question of "do you deserve to fail," and we'll get to that.
But first, you did ask some easy factual questions: "But will I ever shake the guilt of the last few years?"
Absolutely, in less time than you think! Remember the thing people most consistently get wrong about their own minds is that we estimate bad events AND GOOD ONES will affect us for much longer than they actually do. (Google this!)
I'm like you, a high-achiever with some big mental health/executive function blowouts in my past, and I have moved on. I still KNOW I let people down, but that inspires me to be better today instead of causing me pain. It actually gives me a lot of gratitude and self-love. It's human to make mistakes and it's an honor to be human. We are lucky.
"Or the reputational damage that I’m not even sure is real or just in my head... or it’s real for some people, but does that matter in the grand scheme?"
Our mammalian brains are programmed boil down our sense of what every individual person thinks of us into single number or impression, and then base our mood off that impression, with a very strong recency bias so recent events affect that calculation more than distant events.
So your mental snapshot of your status is wounded. You can get a more real-world answer to this question if instead of vague, over-arching "reputation" you think about the actual individual relationships involved and the people who actually know what happened. Remember some of those people will be charitable. Some have had their own struggles, and empathize. All are bound by factors that make it less likely they'll talk about your issues with anyone who doesn't know you--the desire not to "burn bridges" (big in most industries, applies to them as well as you) and also simple boredom and forgetfulness. They'll move on. They're not thinking about you NEARLY as much as you are.
So no, my guess is this won't have much impact, besides you not being able to ask your old colleagues for professional recommendations. We've all got people out there who didn't have the best experience with us, and people who did.
But back to the question that's obsessing you. You're stuck ping-ponging between two visions: "I was really struggling and that was the best I could do" vs "I was lazy and I deserve to fail." Instead of ping-ponging forever between these two dipoles, I like to ask:
ARE THOSE THE ONLY TWO OPTIONS?
WHAT IF NEITHER OF THOSE THINGS IS TRUE?
WHY ARE THEY RELATED?
WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE EITHER/OR?
I, personally, think neither of those things are true. I don't think it's true that you couldn't have done anything differently, I think you can and will do things differently next time. It sounds like you already have ideas about that.
Buy why does the possibility that there were other options available to you AUTOMATICALLY mean you're morally wrong? what if you had options, and the one you chose was right? What if the one you chose was morally neutral? What if not every choice IS either right or wrong?
Let's explore that. You could have dropped out of work when you noticed burnout coming on, but you chose not to. Is that not your right to choose? Who ELSE should choose, if not you?
Why did you choose not to take time off? Because your work did not have a flexible time off policy for mental health? Is it wrong to keep working because your workplace does not make it possible for you to take a break? When I put it that way, does it sound wrong?
When you started messing up at work there were choices too. You noticed your mental health was spiraling terribly. You probably decided to not do certain aspects of your job because those aspects were psychologically painful and you thought they would make your mental health worse. Is it wrong to decide not to do something because it's very painful? Is it wrong to turn in a sub-par performance because you believe a better job performance would destroy you? Why are you so sure that's wrong?
Is it not the right of every human to avoid intense psychological pain? Why, on earth, would "avoiding terrible pain" be wrong?
Is it not the right of every human to DECIDE how good we want to be at our jobs, since I am very confident no one lived or died based on your job performance?
If in fact you weren't "really struggling," why would that AUTOMATICALLY mean you are "lazy" and "deserve" to fail? Those are subjective moral judgments. Those are up to you. You get to decide what your morality is.
It can be the case that you'll do better next time, that you are a good person AND that the people you frustrated or let down at work are ALSO good people. THEY are the ones who get to decide if they, personally, would work with you again or want to be friends or would write you a recommendation letter. That's actually THEIR right to decide, not something you can calculate for them, so stop trying.
Look: because we live in competitive capitalism we get taught this value system where hard work = good = you deserve to succeed = you will succeed. And avoiding pain = bad = you deserve to fail = you will fail.
But that's just PURE SORCERY. That's stoning a witch and waiting for your harvest to improve.
You ARE NOT ASSURED a successful life if you work hard or an unsuccessful life if you don't, that's just something our parents ingrained in us because they HOPED it was true. And of course, NO ONE LIFE IS EITHER 'SUCCESSFUL' or 'UNSUCCESSFUL." That's just another subjective value judgment.
The moral lens of who deserves what is A DIFFERENT QUESTION from the question of what steps you can take now to improve your life, take better care of your mental health, and do better at work. Because deciding whether or not you're "lazy" will not help you answer those questions.
Honestly, try it. Let's say you know for sure: you were "lazy" and you "deserved to fail" at that job. What would you do if that was true? How would it help your next move? Would it?
If you think it would help to decide, THEN DECIDE. Put a number on it. How wrong was it? On a scale of one to genocide? A 1? 0.5? Decide what your moral responsibility was in that situation, what your options were, and take a different option next time.
And when yourself STUCK ON THIS SAME QUESTION, stuck in indecision between "incapable of better" and "morally to blame", STUDY THE FALSE BINARY YOU ARE TRAPPED IN. STUDY THE BARS OF THE CAGE.
Get as specific as you can about that lens you're placing on the world, since it is ONLY a lens.
Exactly. It’s never fair to judge yourself in retrospect. By then, you’re already a different person, seeing things you couldn’t see at the time. So I completely agree with you: the situation is probably less terrible than the letter writer believes. Harsh self-judgment can feel “logical,” but often it’s just cruelty in disguise. You did the best you could with the awareness you had then. Take the lesson and move forward.
Yes I love that. You did the best you could with the knowledge and perspective you had at the time. And now your perspective is changing, based on that experience.
Pure sorcery, I love that! It's true: from the (capitalist, industrial) culture's point of view, it's a self-serving fairytale. Who benefits from the populace believing these moral dictums about "deserving" to succeed or fail? Not the populace: the vast majority of us have no option but to work anyway. Nope: The Man benefits, as us old hippies used to say.
LW, I'm not saying you can never be fulfilled by work in our culture; at times I have been, and at other times I've had to learn quiet quitting because some workplaces are so toxic or mediocre it's literally impossible to do anything else without burning out through overwork or neglect. @Pigeon is right, the "moral" angle is pure BS. Morality is a thing between people, or at least living beings. D'you honestly believe you've actually offended an actual person? Then you can apologise. Otherwise, you can drop that stick you're hitting yourself with. Morality re institutions, especially exploitative ones, is a category mistake.
Polly's advice is *chef's kiss*, as per usual... xo
Something I wanted to add...LW, you are worried about some people thinking badly of you. Maybe they do.
But I LOVE people who spectacularly fail, and I think a lot of other people do. For example, I doubt very many people saw "Bridesmaids" and thought, god what a loser, I hate that girl. We all thought Annie was AMAZING and were rooting for her...right?
I admire and love people who fail, and it's not because I feel superior, it's because when people fail, they become so REAL and it's inspiring! And honestly, success is boring.
To paraphrase an Instagram account that I love ("iamthirtyaf" for those who do Insta): be the shit show you were meant to be, and trust that your people will find you and celebrate you for it!
The Bridesmaids point is so right! We root hardest for the spectacular fail because it’s someone actually being real and trying. There’s something about watching someone refuse to pretend they have it together that makes you trust them completely. Thanks for the Insta rec I'm going to go follow that account.
You're not the worst, I was the worst. I had a job once where I solved difficult problems. Upper management liked me, but the rank and file management and my co-workers were more circumspect, to put it mildly. Every time I solved something, I stepped on toes. I generally didn't care, until I did.
I crashed out of that job, quitting after a leave of absence. I went back to contracting, but that didn't work for me any more either. My reputation was not strong enough for the new clients I found. My old clients had moved on. My heart was no longer in it.
I ended up taking a regular old show-up-for-work job by changing into a different part of my field. I'm going on thirty years in that space, effectively having only changed companies once, and aside from a few hiccups, I'm doing better than I would have expected.
No matter what it is that interferes with your vocational journey, count on your feelings to help cut a path out. I assure you my feelings were a big mess, and that they got messier. It helped when I landed at a place that wanted my skills, really.
There's an irony here too. When I needed that job, I got it because a recruiter called a friend of mine. The job was right under my nose and I would have never found it.
Just one thing. Yes, our culture routinely persuades us we're bad people if we don't constantly live up to its impossible standards. But that doesn't mean we don't have a conscience, or that it might not sometimes prick. If, after all is said and done, you believe you behaved badly there is always the option of saying sorry.
God, this sounds just like me in my 20s. And now, more often than I’d like to admit. OP, the masters of industry who make work suck so hard for most of us? They deserve to feel this way, and whether or not they do is irrelevant — they don’t yield power and keep making people like you, your old colleagues, feel out of place. It’s not you, our economy is built on misery of the many for the insane wealth of the few. And they probably feel miserable, too.
I’m a guy who’s probably failed sideways more often than not. The shame lives in us, too, but we have more power in the economy to displace it on talented smart women who could do our jobs with their hands tied behind their backs. It’s a disease, and we’re the source of that rot.
If I may suggest a soundtrack for the days that feel harder than others “Incomprehensible” by Big Thief and Angie McMahons album “Light Dark, Light Again”
OMG I devoured Famesick! Plus one for this rec. Thank you to Lena for exposing herself so we all feel a little more seen. I really thought she painted her previous romantic relationships rather neutrally. Less like “celebrities” and more like humans.
“We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
I was having a bad day, and I just went back and read this advice, and it helped so much. I love these columns, and I love even more that I can return to them, again and again, whenever I need to hear a voice of reason. Thank you, Polly!!! xo
Wonderful Polly, as always. We are all building ourselves out of little bricks of your wisdom, every day.
OP, you are not a bad person. You think you are a bad person. Truly bad people don’t think that. Ever.
I feel I was placed on this earth (and to renew my Ask Polly subscription) to give you insight. I, too, have struggled obsessively with the same question obsessing you, this question of "do you deserve to fail," and we'll get to that.
But first, you did ask some easy factual questions: "But will I ever shake the guilt of the last few years?"
Absolutely, in less time than you think! Remember the thing people most consistently get wrong about their own minds is that we estimate bad events AND GOOD ONES will affect us for much longer than they actually do. (Google this!)
I'm like you, a high-achiever with some big mental health/executive function blowouts in my past, and I have moved on. I still KNOW I let people down, but that inspires me to be better today instead of causing me pain. It actually gives me a lot of gratitude and self-love. It's human to make mistakes and it's an honor to be human. We are lucky.
"Or the reputational damage that I’m not even sure is real or just in my head... or it’s real for some people, but does that matter in the grand scheme?"
Our mammalian brains are programmed boil down our sense of what every individual person thinks of us into single number or impression, and then base our mood off that impression, with a very strong recency bias so recent events affect that calculation more than distant events.
So your mental snapshot of your status is wounded. You can get a more real-world answer to this question if instead of vague, over-arching "reputation" you think about the actual individual relationships involved and the people who actually know what happened. Remember some of those people will be charitable. Some have had their own struggles, and empathize. All are bound by factors that make it less likely they'll talk about your issues with anyone who doesn't know you--the desire not to "burn bridges" (big in most industries, applies to them as well as you) and also simple boredom and forgetfulness. They'll move on. They're not thinking about you NEARLY as much as you are.
So no, my guess is this won't have much impact, besides you not being able to ask your old colleagues for professional recommendations. We've all got people out there who didn't have the best experience with us, and people who did.
But back to the question that's obsessing you. You're stuck ping-ponging between two visions: "I was really struggling and that was the best I could do" vs "I was lazy and I deserve to fail." Instead of ping-ponging forever between these two dipoles, I like to ask:
ARE THOSE THE ONLY TWO OPTIONS?
WHAT IF NEITHER OF THOSE THINGS IS TRUE?
WHY ARE THEY RELATED?
WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE EITHER/OR?
I, personally, think neither of those things are true. I don't think it's true that you couldn't have done anything differently, I think you can and will do things differently next time. It sounds like you already have ideas about that.
Buy why does the possibility that there were other options available to you AUTOMATICALLY mean you're morally wrong? what if you had options, and the one you chose was right? What if the one you chose was morally neutral? What if not every choice IS either right or wrong?
Let's explore that. You could have dropped out of work when you noticed burnout coming on, but you chose not to. Is that not your right to choose? Who ELSE should choose, if not you?
Why did you choose not to take time off? Because your work did not have a flexible time off policy for mental health? Is it wrong to keep working because your workplace does not make it possible for you to take a break? When I put it that way, does it sound wrong?
When you started messing up at work there were choices too. You noticed your mental health was spiraling terribly. You probably decided to not do certain aspects of your job because those aspects were psychologically painful and you thought they would make your mental health worse. Is it wrong to decide not to do something because it's very painful? Is it wrong to turn in a sub-par performance because you believe a better job performance would destroy you? Why are you so sure that's wrong?
Is it not the right of every human to avoid intense psychological pain? Why, on earth, would "avoiding terrible pain" be wrong?
Is it not the right of every human to DECIDE how good we want to be at our jobs, since I am very confident no one lived or died based on your job performance?
If in fact you weren't "really struggling," why would that AUTOMATICALLY mean you are "lazy" and "deserve" to fail? Those are subjective moral judgments. Those are up to you. You get to decide what your morality is.
It can be the case that you'll do better next time, that you are a good person AND that the people you frustrated or let down at work are ALSO good people. THEY are the ones who get to decide if they, personally, would work with you again or want to be friends or would write you a recommendation letter. That's actually THEIR right to decide, not something you can calculate for them, so stop trying.
Look: because we live in competitive capitalism we get taught this value system where hard work = good = you deserve to succeed = you will succeed. And avoiding pain = bad = you deserve to fail = you will fail.
But that's just PURE SORCERY. That's stoning a witch and waiting for your harvest to improve.
You ARE NOT ASSURED a successful life if you work hard or an unsuccessful life if you don't, that's just something our parents ingrained in us because they HOPED it was true. And of course, NO ONE LIFE IS EITHER 'SUCCESSFUL' or 'UNSUCCESSFUL." That's just another subjective value judgment.
The moral lens of who deserves what is A DIFFERENT QUESTION from the question of what steps you can take now to improve your life, take better care of your mental health, and do better at work. Because deciding whether or not you're "lazy" will not help you answer those questions.
Honestly, try it. Let's say you know for sure: you were "lazy" and you "deserved to fail" at that job. What would you do if that was true? How would it help your next move? Would it?
If you think it would help to decide, THEN DECIDE. Put a number on it. How wrong was it? On a scale of one to genocide? A 1? 0.5? Decide what your moral responsibility was in that situation, what your options were, and take a different option next time.
And when yourself STUCK ON THIS SAME QUESTION, stuck in indecision between "incapable of better" and "morally to blame", STUDY THE FALSE BINARY YOU ARE TRAPPED IN. STUDY THE BARS OF THE CAGE.
Get as specific as you can about that lens you're placing on the world, since it is ONLY a lens.
Exactly. It’s never fair to judge yourself in retrospect. By then, you’re already a different person, seeing things you couldn’t see at the time. So I completely agree with you: the situation is probably less terrible than the letter writer believes. Harsh self-judgment can feel “logical,” but often it’s just cruelty in disguise. You did the best you could with the awareness you had then. Take the lesson and move forward.
Yes I love that. You did the best you could with the knowledge and perspective you had at the time. And now your perspective is changing, based on that experience.
"But that's just PURE SORCERY. That's stoning a witch and waiting for your harvest to improve."
Love this!!
I needed to hear this too, thank you.
Pure sorcery, I love that! It's true: from the (capitalist, industrial) culture's point of view, it's a self-serving fairytale. Who benefits from the populace believing these moral dictums about "deserving" to succeed or fail? Not the populace: the vast majority of us have no option but to work anyway. Nope: The Man benefits, as us old hippies used to say.
LW, I'm not saying you can never be fulfilled by work in our culture; at times I have been, and at other times I've had to learn quiet quitting because some workplaces are so toxic or mediocre it's literally impossible to do anything else without burning out through overwork or neglect. @Pigeon is right, the "moral" angle is pure BS. Morality is a thing between people, or at least living beings. D'you honestly believe you've actually offended an actual person? Then you can apologise. Otherwise, you can drop that stick you're hitting yourself with. Morality re institutions, especially exploitative ones, is a category mistake.
Polly's advice is *chef's kiss*, as per usual... xo
Something I wanted to add...LW, you are worried about some people thinking badly of you. Maybe they do.
But I LOVE people who spectacularly fail, and I think a lot of other people do. For example, I doubt very many people saw "Bridesmaids" and thought, god what a loser, I hate that girl. We all thought Annie was AMAZING and were rooting for her...right?
I admire and love people who fail, and it's not because I feel superior, it's because when people fail, they become so REAL and it's inspiring! And honestly, success is boring.
To paraphrase an Instagram account that I love ("iamthirtyaf" for those who do Insta): be the shit show you were meant to be, and trust that your people will find you and celebrate you for it!
The Bridesmaids point is so right! We root hardest for the spectacular fail because it’s someone actually being real and trying. There’s something about watching someone refuse to pretend they have it together that makes you trust them completely. Thanks for the Insta rec I'm going to go follow that account.
Hi The Worst,
You're not the worst, I was the worst. I had a job once where I solved difficult problems. Upper management liked me, but the rank and file management and my co-workers were more circumspect, to put it mildly. Every time I solved something, I stepped on toes. I generally didn't care, until I did.
I crashed out of that job, quitting after a leave of absence. I went back to contracting, but that didn't work for me any more either. My reputation was not strong enough for the new clients I found. My old clients had moved on. My heart was no longer in it.
I ended up taking a regular old show-up-for-work job by changing into a different part of my field. I'm going on thirty years in that space, effectively having only changed companies once, and aside from a few hiccups, I'm doing better than I would have expected.
No matter what it is that interferes with your vocational journey, count on your feelings to help cut a path out. I assure you my feelings were a big mess, and that they got messier. It helped when I landed at a place that wanted my skills, really.
There's an irony here too. When I needed that job, I got it because a recruiter called a friend of mine. The job was right under my nose and I would have never found it.
Best of luck to you.
I love this and it's exactly what I needed to hear (as someone who is often feeling ashamed and very mean to herself) <3
Thanks, Polly 🖤🖤🖤
This letter is screaming undiagnosed ADHD so there's that. But sometimes you just fail and that's life and there's that as well.
Just one thing. Yes, our culture routinely persuades us we're bad people if we don't constantly live up to its impossible standards. But that doesn't mean we don't have a conscience, or that it might not sometimes prick. If, after all is said and done, you believe you behaved badly there is always the option of saying sorry.
God, this sounds just like me in my 20s. And now, more often than I’d like to admit. OP, the masters of industry who make work suck so hard for most of us? They deserve to feel this way, and whether or not they do is irrelevant — they don’t yield power and keep making people like you, your old colleagues, feel out of place. It’s not you, our economy is built on misery of the many for the insane wealth of the few. And they probably feel miserable, too.
I’m a guy who’s probably failed sideways more often than not. The shame lives in us, too, but we have more power in the economy to displace it on talented smart women who could do our jobs with their hands tied behind their backs. It’s a disease, and we’re the source of that rot.
What a masterpiece. I feel the same about Lena.
If I may suggest a soundtrack for the days that feel harder than others “Incomprehensible” by Big Thief and Angie McMahons album “Light Dark, Light Again”
Sending love xx
OMG I devoured Famesick! Plus one for this rec. Thank you to Lena for exposing herself so we all feel a little more seen. I really thought she painted her previous romantic relationships rather neutrally. Less like “celebrities” and more like humans.
One of my favourite quotes
Pema Chodron
“We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
I was having a bad day, and I just went back and read this advice, and it helped so much. I love these columns, and I love even more that I can return to them, again and again, whenever I need to hear a voice of reason. Thank you, Polly!!! xo