I wasn't good enough.

2:25 800m run. Three seconds better than the leg of the 4x800 that I had run four weeks before, 12 seconds better than anything I had run last year. I could have done better. My parents are impressed, but I am disappointed with my pacing. I could have taken the second lap harder.

I always want to get better. Even when people around me tell me that I’ve succeeded, I ask myself, “If I could do that, how much further can I make myself go?” Going back to that 800 meter run, I asked myself how much more time I could have cut off if I had pushed myself harder through the middle two laps. I expect a certain standard out of myself and it shows when I make a mistake.

There are a couple of modes I fall into when I make a mistake. They generally fall into one of two types. The first is when I realize I messed up after doing something is done. In these cases, I wonder what I could have done differently. Sometimes the answer is obvious, sometimes not. Something like forgetting how algebra works during a test is something that is obvious after I start talking to other people who did the same problem. In that case, I just have to pay more attention next time. Other things, like with social interaction, it isn’t as clear when I've overstepped boundaries. It can take a while before I find out that I'd made a mistake, and by that time, it can be too late to fix things. I used to agonize for long periods of time, sometimes multiple days, on what I could have done, and how that might have made things ‘better,’ but I've since realized that that doesn't do me any good. So I accept that I messed up, and put my energy towards figuring out what to do next.

The other type of mistake is the ones I notice while I'm making them. When that happens, I tend to buckle down and focus on problem at hand, often at the cost of clear communication. This particularly shows up when I'm playing hard missions of Warframe with my dad. (I know, I write about this a lot, but I've invested over 1200 hours of my life into this game.) When things go sideways, I stop talking and start playing furiously. I start making faster movements, generally playing better, but my team has no idea what I'm doing, where I'm going, or what they can do to help. This is the point when my dad usually tells me "Talk to me. I get that things are going poorly, but I don't know what you want me to do to help out." It doesn't help that I play very fast characters, so if I blitz off on my own, it's unlikely that my team can catch up to me. This problem stems from me expecting to be able to do anything and everything. When things start going wrong, I want to solve the problems then and there, as soon as I can. And I also expect to be good enough to solve these problems on my own, even when the situation quickly shows me that I really do need some help.

Given how I react to mistake, I’d say I'm pretty hard on myself. I expect to do my best at whatever I do and am disappointed when I'm not. Sometimes that's me not knowing how far I can push myself and unintentionally limiting myself, such as in running, sometimes it's just straight-up overestimation of my ability. But because of this, I've learned to accept my mistakes and move on to figuring out how to avoid those mistakes. There's no changing the past. We have to live in the world we've created for ourselves.