That awful twisting feeling in your gut. The involuntary contraction of abdominal muscles. The clenching fists. The uncontrollable shivering even though the room is warm.
It’s not just the combination of too much shitty coffee and too little sleep.
It just hit you. There’s too much left to do. There are too many details to coordinate before it’s time to go pencils down.
You’re going to miss stuff. Significant details and coordination items are going to get dropped. The holes in your work stare at you like accusing eyes, boring into your soul and trashing your sense of worth.
You goofed. You made a mistake. You are not kicking ass. Right now, you suck.
This is altogether different than failing at something.
Failing means you thought you were right, thought you were kicking ass, but were simply wrong. You “tried your best” – honestly – you just made an error and slipped up. Failure is actually a good thing – it means you’re putting your neck out there, being courageous, and learning.
This isn’t like that. This is just you not having your shit together. You had enough time and resources to take care of business, but you didn’t.
Maybe you should have worked over the weekend, or just worked faster, prioritized better, said “no” to that other lower-priority task.
Definitely you should have communicated better, and taken a step back sooner to evaluate where you were at.
But now it is too late.
There’s only one thing you can now do:
Tell everyone you fucked up.
And that it won’t happen again.
And make goddamn sure it never does.