FAILURE

Failure has a social narrative: it's a teacher, a necessary precursor to success, the thing that makes the eventual achievement meaningful. This is true, eventually, for some failures. What it doesn't capture: the experience of being inside failure before you know if there's a lesson, before you know if you'll recover, when it's just the plain fact of something not working — often with people watching.

The version of yourself that failed is not comfortable to look at directly. The honest account of what happened — the real reasons, the real cost, what it revealed about you that you hadn't wanted to know — is what most people avoid examining.

This thread holds the examination. The honest version, before the narrative, without the part where it becomes useful.