For most of my life, it was easier to see myself as a failure. Not because I wanted to believe that about myself — but because it hurt less. When something didn't work out, when I took a wrong turn, when life didn't look the way I thought it was supposed to look, the story of I am a failure was already there, ready and waiting. It became my identity before I even realised I had chosen it. And the strange, exhausting contradiction? Alongside that belief lived a burning, relent