What are the consequences of making a mistake?

For me, a mistake is disastrous. It means that no one will love me. No one cares for a fuck-up. This places enormous pressure on me to perform well all the time. If I don’t do it right the first time, I might as well kill myself, because the rest of my life will be hell.

As you might imagine, this makes me hyper-sensitive to what others think about me. It also makes me hyper-sensitive to their body language and interpreting their actions. It makes me over-estimate the presence of negative feelings about me, because I have to constantly be prepared to lose this job/person/activity/whatever. I need to have something to go to, if I lose what I’ve got, and since we can’t not make mistakes, it is inevitable that I will lose what I’ve got.

Thus, if I think I’m going to fuck up and lose something important, but I don’t know when it’ll happen, the pressure can be incredibly intense. Usually, I break before it happens (because, in the real world, people don’t get rid of you just because of one mistake). When I break, I make the mistake consequence happen. I do it so the pressure will come off. It’s far easier to be unhappy or depressed than it is to be living as if your neck was on the chopping block, and you were waiting for the ax to fall.

So I strive to be as perfect as I can, so no one will push me out.; so no one will swing that ax. Similarly, I remain anonymous here in order to be safe from the ax. If you can’t find me, you can’t hurt me.

These thoughts are not something that I believe intellectually. These reactions occur at a much deeper level. For example, when I had a question moderated that I thought should not have been—it was a question I must have cared deeply about—I took that as the beginning of the end. I had made a mistake. It happened right when I hit 10K, too.

I closed my account. I killed off daloon. This was an almost instinctual action. I was not about to wait for the shit to hit the fan.

At the time, I was wondering if anyone would notice or care. Apparently, I need constant reassurance, or I start believing that no one likes me; no one thinks I have anything to contribute. Again, this is not on an intellectual level. This is happening in some kind of powerful inside brain that learned this is the way life is early on in my life. It’s why I have so much trouble trusting that anyone really loves me. Or that love is unconditional, because it was always conditional when I was growing up.

This is a question about you, personally. I’m not asking for any generalizations or solutions, just experience. This is about your level of fear about making a mistake. How catastrophic is it if you fuck up? In your internal thinking, what is the archetypal consequence of making a mistake? Where do you think your ideas about the consequence of mistakes came from?