Inadequacy...

Rejection, betrayal, anxiety, pain, loss and fear… all of them are emotions that are hard to stomach. They are all quite hard to come to terms with before the inevitable moving on. But I feel, that somehow the difficulties they present or the trauma they cause… pale when compared to the pangs of inadequacy.

Rejection for instance, is a dreadful experience… especially for the one being rejected. There is something crushing about the feeling of putting oneself out there… making oneself vulnerable and getting shot down brutally for our efforts. It shatters people, robs them of their will to get out of bed in the mornings and face a new day. For a while it saps their spirit, and drains all the zest from their lives.

But after a while… things do get better. Having brooded on things for a while everyone agrees that there is more to life than just one unattained goal. This realization gets us back on our feet… and we resume from where we had left off.

The effect of betrayal… has a similar life cycle. Start with a heart rending sense of loneliness and hurt. Spend a gloomy week closeted in the dark struggling with your seesawing feelings of anger and depression. And end with a solemn vow to never let down your guard again.

On the whole… all these feelings (after their respective durations of reducing us to jelly) help us improve after a fashion. Loss makes us learn the fleeting nature of attachments, pain prepares us for the ordeals of life… and fear helps us overcome our own boundaries, when we face them.

But, when we learn that what we have done… or are capable of doing is not enough there is nothing we can take back from the knowledge that’ll turn to our advantage. When we are told that we fall short of the requirements, or that we cannot provide what is needed, it’s a blow every bit as crushing as a rejection marinated in loss and humiliation.

The knowledge that we or our endeavor has been inadequate is a difficult pill to swallow… and one that always does more harm than good.

There isn’t anything that can be done to improve the state of affairs… since the whole task has already been done before we come to know of our shortcomings. There isn’t any way for us to travel back in time and change what has already occurred. There isn’t even a major desire to improve as nothing will make up for the damage already done.

All that we have left is a sense of shame and helplessness… neither of which can be construed as positive.

The most common of reactions to the whole debacle…is secrecy… a base suppression of facts in a half baked attempt, to prevent knowledge of our failings from reaching the masses. Apart from preserving a small section of our dignity (saving face, in other words) this has no upside. Downsides however… there are plenty.

We enter a world of guarded secrets, seeking no purpose other than to spread falsehood for personal and misguided gain. We begin the long drawn process of alienating the ones who would otherwise have stood by us and made matters just a little more bearable. Instead of focusing on doing the needful and getting ready for damage control (a task that with our full attention we can only succeed in accomplishing partly), we dig deeper into our flaws and hide there in fear and resentment.

So… what to do when our shortcomings come knocking? I haven’t the faintest idea. Just like in the case of so many other things… I have very clear views on the things we shouldn’t do… and none whatsoever on what we should. In an ideal world… this would have been enough to at least point me in the right direction… but well, last time I checked, the third planet from the sun wasn’t the Garden of Eden.

I guess, looking into the future and considering the past as a warning is one of the only plausible solutions available at this point. It’s unfortunate that instead of a success, it’s a failure that has to serve as the motivating factor, for the correction of the old mistakes.