Due to this, I’m afraid of working on my own projects. This fear especially intensifies when I’m reaching some kind of milestone or personal goal (e.g. implementing a feature in software, or going to the next phase of a drawing), and end up procrastinating instead. Even worse is that I believe if I could get them finished, I could probably fix my current financial state.
Please note that in my country (Hungary), public mental health care is nearly nonexistent, and they’re only existing so the state can point to it. I don’t have any money for the private stuff, and I have higher priority health concerns that would benefit from higher-quality care (e.g. switching anti-seizure medications as my current doctor ignores its side effects).
I have not just a fear of failure but a fear of sabotage, internally and externally, given all our society runs on exclusive access and privilege. Any time I’m in a chair when the music stops, I’m responsible for the poor sod fed to the grinder.
So yeah, I don’t compete, ever.
And that’s okay. Society was never trying to be fair or a good-faith society. It’s all coming crashing down around us, because the guys at the top couldn’t stop their own greed and excess, couldn’t see the long game, even for their own children.
You and I didn’t really fail if we never had a fighting chance.
That said, do a thing you like and keep doing it, disregarding failure, and eventually you’ll find you are a high-ranking expert and have been maintaining a illustrious career for the last decade and a few of your opuses are on Wikipedia as a definitive example of a specific period style, maybe the Ur-example of a trend in the field. As Chuck Jones noted, every artist has a hundred thousand bad drawings in them they have to draw out.