Fear of f***ing things up- a question

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How many of you are like me? Fearful of trying new things because you think you're going to totally f*** things up.

I am a total perfectionist and always need things to be perfect, so yes I am always afraid of new things in fear of messing them up. I am 18 and am heading to college soon and am deathly afraid of messing it up or not doing everything perfectly. One of the things I have tried to do is ask myself "If everything doesn't go exactly as you've planned, is it really gonna be catastrophic?" This question usually calms me down because I know that even if something goes wrong (like the bed sheets I've ordered doesn't fit the bed in my future dorm correctly) it's not gonna be the end of everything as my brain tells me it will be. I definitely relate to having this fear, so you are not alone in that. Thank you for sharing!
-Kelly

right there with you.
Its got a little better with practice ( 70 years of it) but it fills my heart with fear to be asked to try anything new. Especially in front of others!
I get trembly inside , shaky limbs sometimes too and my voice locks up...I can freeze up completely!
you know just what I mean, I'm sure!

I catastrophise too. It never turns out quite as bad as expected.Sometimes it turns out just fine,Does that make me castastrophise less next time? A big NO to that. It's an anxiety version of 'Groundhog day'.

Well, I do have a tendency to do really well or do fantastically awful (and not much in between). So it's not such much a fear as fact for me. The trick for me is to embrace the F up's.

Yes. Most tasks are difficult for me. I tend to muddle through fairly well, but I live in constant fear of screwing up on something important. So I try to carefully plan everything I do. It's often hard for me to make a start, and I think part of the reason is my strange lack of faith in my own abilities. And I can't easily occupy the middle ground between perfectionism and making a complete mess of a task, so I tend to set very stringent standards for everything I do, not knowing what corners I can safely cut.

The fear of failure has probably become worse since I arrived back in the UK. I was expecting a lot of services to have "decayed" after my being out of the country for so long, and I was right. Service providers change things, familiar shops close down, buses are cancelled, routes and timetables change, and I can barely remember how I used to perform some "simple" tasks. So I was faced with a lot of things going wrong at the same time, and a lot of work trying to recover, and a lot of that work involved having to talk to service providers (which always scares me). It's still going on, and although I've made quite a bit of progress, I still don't feel up to the job.

i long ago figured out that i have to try new things in order to keep my brain enough steps away from senescence. but it is always like jumping naked into an ice-cold swimming pool.

It's been said I do better when there's routine and structure. The trouble being my worst EF weaknesses are organising and planning. There's a lot of things I'm rather crap at, and not much I'm good at. I basically suck at the skills needed to navigate as smoothly as possible through life. With failure comes the fear of harsh words and mockery.Sometimes I think avoidant pd would be a good fit for me. I lead a rather restricted lifestyle, avoiding quite a lot because of that fear.

I joined a FB group that's purpose is online campaigning for the political party I support(Labour). I've done sod all but post pro Labour/anti Tory stuff on FB and Twitter. I've not posted on the group itself because I don't feel good enough.

That's a regular pattern with me . A flash of bravado quickly snuffed out by the fear of failure,of not being good enough. A classic example joining https://president2205.wixsite.com/foursigmasociety because technically I could, only to look at the membership list and think 'No way am I good enough' . These are brilliant people. Whereas I just got lucky on a test.

This seems to be a big factor as to why many autistics fail to flourish.

It's less about not being able to do things but rather refusing to find out if it's possible or not through fear and a sense of losing control.

Avoidance of all things fearful is usually unhealthy and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for many autistics.

I've f****d up plenty of times, and will f**k up again.

If I don't do something, it's quite possibly because my "f**k-up" would cause considerable harm. If I don't think my "f**k-up" would cause harm to anybody but myself, I tend to want to make the attempt.

My mother is a paradox: she let me be independent----but she sought to restrain me from trying things like learning to drive.

I believed that should I f**k-up learning to drive, that I probably wouldn't harm anybody else----and I wanted to learn to drive----so I pursued learning to drive.

It''s only been since 2018 that the so called health professionals have cottoned on the fact that there's more going on than SMI in my case. That meant over 40 years of difficulties not being recognised and adequate help not being given. It also meant lots of criticism for for failing to be as good at 'b' than I am at 'a'. You have to go through that kind of thing to understand just how much it fuels the fear of failure, and saps your self confidence. It's very easy to go into avoidant mode in such a situation. Added to that is the therapist who tells you 'If you want to be a good person'... . To add further to that already toxic brew there's the unqualified day centre worker assigned to help you with anxiety. who tells you lack self confidence, but then goes out of her way to find fault with you. None of that mentioned so far is conducive to flourishing.

I am often deathly afraid of making mistakes because I am a mistake.

my worst period of fkkkup is joining the army, and while i was in the army i did countless fkkkups and i have to kill those ruminations when they pop up in my mind.