I thought I feared failure. I was really afraid of disappointing people
I read it once, then again, then a third time, hunting for the sentence that might be wrong, the question I should have asked but didn’t. This has gone on long enough, and I had a simple explanation for it: fear of failure. Everyone has that, don’t they? But somewhere along the way, I noticed the picture in my head wasn’t of my editor telling me the piece wasn’t good enough. It was the particular expression on the faces of people who believed I could do better. A flicker of disappointment, not anger, which is somehow worse. It made me wonder whether I was really afraid of failing at all, or afraid of what failing might say to the people whose good opinion I’d come to depend on.The more I sat with it, the more I noticed how selective the fear was. I rarely asked myself, “Will this go wrong?” The question that actually formed, uninvited, was, “What if I let everyone down?” When something goes well, I move on within the hour. When I make a mistake, I carry it for days, not because of the mistake itself, but because I’m convinced I’ve chipped away at somebody’s faith in me. Oddly still, praise doesn’t quite land as encouragement. It lands as a debt. The more someone believes in me, the more terrified I become of the day I don’t live up to it. I’ve since learned this isn’t a personality trait, or at least not only that. It has a name, or several overlapping ones, and a shape that psychologists and sociologists recognise instantly once you describe it to them. It isn’t perfectionism, and it isn’t quite imposter syndrome either, though it often travels with both. It is something more specific: anxiety that is anchored not in the task, but in the relationship and in the fear of being the reason someone else’s trust turns out to have been misplaced. The weight of being trusted Rupali Rani, 28, an account manager who has spent years juggling high-priority deliverables, recognised the distinction the moment it was put to her. While handling multiple pressing projects at once, she realised she wasn’t afraid of the work itself. “For me, the fear has never been just about failure; it’s about not living up to the faith someone has placed in me,” she tells indianexpress.com. That fear doesn’t announce itself as pressure every day. She genuinely likes her job, but when the workload builds, she finds herself overpreparing, rereading what she’s already sent, and struggling to properly switch off once the laptop is shut. Recognition, when it comes, complicates things rather than settles them. “Appreciation motivates me, but the ‘high performer’ tag also comes with invisible expectations,” she says.Story continues below this ad Once people begin expecting excellence as a baseline, an average day starts to feel like a small betrayal. For a long time, she estimates, work claimed roughly eighty per cent of her emotional bandwidth against twenty for everything else, a ratio she is now trying, consciously and slowly, to correct. What has stayed with Rani is a line she now repeats to herself: trust, she says, “is built over time; not lost because of one imperfect day.” For S Paul, 25, in her first job after campus placement, the fear arrived dressed as diligence. She was doing well, being praised, and still living with a low hum of dread that something might unravel it all. She began arming herself before she’d even reached her desk, absorbing tips and strategies from people who’d survived long careers, on top of an already demanding job, until the preparation itself became a second job. Paul says she avoided taking leave because she worried it would look like a retreat to her manager, and found herself interrogating her own need for rest before allowing it. Praise, when it arrived, didn’t register as reassurance so much as a puzzle to be solved: after a strong training review, she assumed there had to be an ulterior motive, some reason her mentor was inflating the feedback. “I thanked him a mil
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