Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Failure

I'm not good at it. At all. I take it very hard. I will struggle through, lose sleep, obsess until I make it work rather than fail.

I failed today.

A couple of weeks ago a friend called to see if I would do a little side work for him. A few hours a week, nothing too difficult. I wrote about how it wasn't going well. I struggled through it for the past week or so.

I have worked on this project 6-8 hours a day. This was suppose to be a 10 hour/week deal. I'm not sleeping well. I feel nauseated when I think about it and it is constantly on my mind.

Last night I sat at the computer at 10pm crying. I thought I was going to stay up until 2 am working again, but I couldn't do it. I had no idea how to fix it and I didn't see how another 4 hours on little sleep was going to help. I went to bed. Of course it took me almost 2 hours to fall asleep because my mind was racing. I was back up again at 5am trying again to figure it out.

This morning I told DH I was done. I couldn't do this anymore. I had failed and I couldn't continue on this way. I had to call and quit this job. The extra money would have been nice, but it wasn't worth all this. Luckily he kissed me and said he agreed.

I dropped the kids off at school, did a sudoku puzzle while I got up some nerve to call the boss guy. I had to tell him was in over my head and I couldn't finish the project. I knew I was going to disappoint him and I hated making that call. I was going to tell him I was sorry for the trouble but I had to quit.

Instead, he apologized to me. He said he knew that this project was too big for me to start on. It was way more complicated than he thought I should have and he should have pulled it when he first heard that they had assigned it to me. I'm going in today and he's going to give the mess I made project back to the manager who gave it to me and give me something else to work on.

I took a deep sigh of relief. Maybe this isn't total failure, maybe it will be okay. The anxious/sick feeling isn't gone yet, but the total dread when thinking about this job is lifting.

1 comment:

Susan said...

You are the farthest from a failure of anyone I know. Just go back and read your blog. Look at all that you do and all that you're good at. I envy you. If you had trouble with the project, then I there must be very few people that can do it.