Hard ways to lose 2 grams of weight (health)

On Tuesday I went in for the second try at the stone-removal operation. It was successful - the stone is dust. I have a much smaller piece of plastic in my body now and an appointment for next week to get it removed. After that, follow the diet and hope.
( Details, nothing particularly awful here but probably not widely interesting )

Now if I can just remember to stay properly hydrated.

Journaling project, Day 12

You can disappoint people and still be good enough. You can fail and still be smart, capable and talented. You can let people down and still be worthwhile and deserving of love and admiration. We all make mistakes sometimes. Take a deep breath. You are allowed to be human.

How does giving yourself full permission to be human feel right now? How will you remind yourself to do this more often?

I am always human, and always an imperfect human. I say this a lot about my work output. I have been doing design/UX work for 25-30 years and can count the number of times I've gotten a design "right" on the first try on fingers of both hands. I also am deeply ingrained with the Media Lab credo of "fail early, fail often".

That said, there's a big gap in my mind between failing on an item - a deliverable, a project, a design - and disappointing people. I take it seriously when people rely on me and I try not to let them down. Over the years I've tried to get better about setting expectations and not letting people push things on me that I don't think I can deliver on. But sometimes there's nobody else and the alternatives are "keep one more ball in the air" and "let something drop." Or have someone else see that the ball is going to drop and them have to dive in and catch it.

This in my mind relates to the "emotional labor" idea that I've started trying to educate myself about in the last year or so. I let things drop that other people, such as my partner, think are important and ought not to drop. So they pick them up and end up doing the work for me. Not necessarily because I asked them to do, but because we don't have a fully shared idea of what the expectations are and what's important to do.

So, yes, I'll agree that it's important to remind oneself to be human and be allowed to be imperfect. But it's also important to remember that humans are not islands - we're part of complex networks and our individual failings can have ripples onto other parts of those networks. Giving myself permission to fail isn't enough - I have to be cognizant of how my failures and imperfects are going to affect and burden people around me.

Like a lot of us, I'm my own harshest critic, but it's usually because I don't like the way my failures affect people I care about.