There’s this habit I have, a bad habit I’m trying to break, but it’s so deeply ingrained that I don’t know where to start.

My whole life, whenever I’ve suspected that I wouldn’t succeed at something – or worse, that someone else would be more successful at it – I’ve found a way to convince myself that I never actually cared in the first place.

Over the years, I’ve gotten so good at avoiding the pain of failure that I’ve started predicting which things I am likely to care about – and therefore be affected by when I don’t succeed – so I can avoid them completely.

It’s cowardly. I don’t know how I got this way, but I hate it. I work so hard to preemptively avoid failing at things I care about that I no longer know what it is I truly care about. I honestly can’t tell if it’s me or my fear that’s making my decisions, because we’ve been together so long that my fear and I are essentially one and the same.

I can feel this happening right now. It’s tied up in school-internship-job opportunities, and I’ve gotten it in my head that I’m not cut out for any of this – not just publishing, but the entire work-a-day world, and life in general… so I shouldn’t even try. It sucks.