We all suck sometimes. Some more often than others. But how do you act when you know you sucked?
Are you the kind of person who doesn’t let it get them down and pass it off as a lose. Another learning experiance.
Or are you like me, and just want to brew in your own sucktitude for a while.
When I’m in that mood, I don’t want anyone to make me feel better. To tell me I “did my best.” I just want to be left alone. I’ll get over it sooner or later. If it was at something major, I’ll get over it later than sooner. Then I’ll be back to normal, as if nothing ever happened. But if someone keeps pestering me after I told them to leave me alone, things’ll be said, and it just makes things worse of everyone. Probaly not the healthiest, but it works…for me at least.
I have to brew in it for a while, definitely. Give myself a little abuse for it. Push away all friends’ attempts to make me feel better about what has happened. Just go away, leave me to it. I’ll be human again when I feel like it. Doing it right now, as a matter of fact. This board (and seeing one of my roommates in the bathroom) is the most human contact I’ve had (or wanted) all day.
I’m a bitch on wheels. I act out, snub people, mope, make dire categorical pronouncements about myself, get drunk and repeat as necessary. I usually need about 36 hours to get totally over it.
I sulk, and get angry. Leave me alone if I’ve f*ed up, because I’ll end up snarking at you and making everyone unhappy. Then I try to bury all evidence, I don’t like my failure staring me in the face
I lower the air pressure in my mouth. I’m not sure exactly how that works. I figure it must be me pulling down on my diaphragm, but it’s just another of those unconscious things.
If there’s something I can do to fix things, I do that. If there’s someone I owe an apology to, I give them one. Then I move on. Like plnnr said: “Life’s too short to waste much energy on your own fuck-ups.”
I rationalize, blame other people, etc. Sometimes a little voice sort of says, “you know that was actually all your fault and you suck quite badly,” but then a bigger voice totally changes the subject and when I try to remember that troubling inner voice of reason my brain gets all frozen. That’s my cognitive dissonance in action. It’s very uncomfortable. Sometimes I try to force myself to face the suckingness at least a bit so that later, when I am more calm, I will be able to apologize for blaming other people and maybe chip away at that evil tendency. I think it’s working. I’m getting better at not going into utter denial.
Other times when there is no way to avoid the suck, I just do something I don’t suck at until I feel like I evened things out.
It depends what I’m sucking at. If I am sucking at stringing up Christmas lights or getting my hair trimmed on time it’s not too bad and I just think, “wow, I find new things to suck at every day!” and I take it in stride. If I’m sucking at some important element of my job, or something I kind of need to not suck at, that’s when the brain meltdown occurs. It’s compounded by my sucking at dealing with my suckingness too.
That kinda sounds like what I do to, sometimes. I get a nice blame train going, and then the little voice comes back and says “You know, you’re the one who broked it”. And then the arguments start.
I ask myself if there was something different that I should have done in order to not suck, and if it would’ve been reasonable for me to have taken that action and if the answer is no, then I move on and and consider it a lesson learned and use it as information for future decisions and if I reasonably could’ve not sucked, then I also consider it a lesson learned, but feel worse about it because I actually did fuck up. No point in getting too upset though - just have to move on and do better next time.
Sometimes a little voice sort of says, “you know that was actually all your fault and you suck quite badly,” but then a bigger voice totally changes the subject and when I try to remember that troubling inner voice of reason my brain gets all frozen. That’s my cognitive dissonance in action. It’s very uncomfortable. Sometimes I try to force myself to face the suckingness at least a bit so that later, when I am more calm, I will be able to apologize for blaming other people and maybe chip away at that evil tendency. I think it’s working. I’m getting better at not going into utter denial.