"You need to do this."

          I feel like life is a lot of hanging in the balance between doing something and not doing something. Doing is important; we are told this frequently. Doing is what people see, and doing is what gets us places. But sometimes it is hard to "do". You set small goals. Minuscule ones. Things that you could tell another person about and they wouldn't bat an eye at. But sometimes you slip, you slip for awhile, and you start to lose faith in yourself. You let the slipping pile up and you don't know how to stop it, you are too exhausted to try to. And you don't know if these moments are supposed to mean something. Some small goals are the things you feel like you should do every day. You may stop those for awhile but eventually you pull yourself back together. But sometimes they are seemingly small goals that mean a lot to you, and you don't accomplish them and you break a little. Or maybe you break a lot. You put a lot of mental and emotional preparation into something; and you told yourself you could do it. You could imagine it happening. It was going to happen. And then it doesn't- and it feels like hell. Because then all of the shit you push to the back of your mind because it's "irrational" and "not true" comes to the surface. All of your "I could be a failure.", "I'm always going to let fear get in the way.", and "I'm not meant to be one of those happy people." insecurities flood to the surface. A vein has been split open, and you wonder why the fuck you tried doing this.
          Big failures happen too. Failures that other people actually see. You think you don't care what people think of you, but when you blatantly fail it is a different kind of pain than when you do alone. Because then you have someone else on your back(Or you just feel as though they are) about what you're doing wrong when you're already hard enough on yourself. You don't need anyone else managing your successes and failures, because you are already very familiar with guilt and don't need it coming from anywhere else. In general, failure stings. It is something that we learn from and grow from, but we can't deny that it affects us. It breaks our spirits. It is possible for failure to just be as bad as it is supposed to be. It breaks you down and maybe you never get back up in the same way again. But maybe it always does turn out for the best, because a lot of the time, you "fail" at shit you barely even care about. Like Acing anthropology or doing what your parents want you to do or getting a job you barely even want. But everything has turned into a failure that hurts because you put effort into it. You didn't want to put the effort into it, but life isn't about always doing what you want either; so you did.
          I just don't know what matters and what doesn't. In the grand scale of my life, like speaking about my death bed, I won't be thinking about these small moments. But they still amount to something. I sternly believe in every moment of your life meaning something, whether an event bringing a profound realization or thousands of moments of thought bringing you to a conclusion about who you are and what you want and what you believe in. That's why I don't know how much these failures mean. I automatically treat them with the magnitude of an atomic bomb, and I realized over the past couple of months that it's because of how I've been raised. My parents want me to give everything to every single task and conflict in my life; and I'm not the type of person who can mentally handle that. Yet I still have the "Treat every single failure or possible failure as if it is going to kill you" trait. I can't shake it. Thinking about writing things off freaks me out, because I don't want to just trudge by, but I don't want to be the over dramatic lunatic either. This is where my standstill is. I can't deny that a part of it is being young. The less years you have accumulated on this planet, the less you know what to expect. And a person like me is driven absolutely nuts by that. But I don't want to live a predictable, planned out life in my comfort zone either. So that is why all of this uncertainty exists. I suppose I'll have to just deal with it, and keep searching for things to add to my life to stabilize me. I think that's all I can do.