I do it often enough, so I shouldn’t be surprised, but it seems at this time of year it always comes at me, amplified.

For many, this season is a period for new starts, and I too feel some of this as December winds down and new calendars are poised to take their place on desktops and walls.

For many, the gap between Christmas and New Year’s Day also comes with some uncomfortable reflections from the past year.

It always does for me.

The inner uttering of failures.

Some of these inner impressions are simple and dismissible. Books started but unfinished. Tables queued to be cleared off and emptied of clutter. Furniture I thought I would build. With a loud chuckle, these incompletions surface in my mind and then swim off into the dark regions of my brain, into the giant file room of the unconscious where they sleep with the rest of everything I’ve seen, felt and largely forgot.

There are the loud ones, though, that never quite settle down, and find this time of the year just right for clanging around in my head.

Primarily, these noisy ones are thoughts of people I’ve let down. People I’ve failed.

The main kind of failure, really.

That list seems long this year, in part because I started the year highly involved in church and in a number of lives, and ended it withdrawn and in hibernation.

There are three particular ones that jab at me the most, and its probably because they have been left unattended or unresolved for a year or more. And because I made the inner choice to let them drop.

My reasons for these friendship failures are not really that good at all. It’s not like I was deeply offended or wronged by any of them.

I think in these cases, I just felt drained and on empty, and that I usually left a connection with them feeling more depleted or worse about myself, and not because of anything they did. I just never had the right words to say, or enough help to offer, or in one case, I’d end up getting off each call feeling jealous about their life and more unhappy with mine.

Still, in each of these three cases, we were pretty close friends for a decent amount of time, and now we aren’t., largely because of me.

So I feel the weight of failures past.

And feel the fear of failures future.

For some reason, I chose to pick up the baton for organizing our high school class’ 30th reunion coming up in 2016. At first, I was assertive and through a Facebook group got classmates collecting to talk about things, even getting a weekend date set. But that was 3 months ago. Now 7 months out, I am paralyzed, unsure of what I am doing, freezing about failure, and we do not have facilities lined up, which a guidebook I found online said should be done a year in advance.

I’ll try to deal with that in the next day or two- at least explore some options for gatherings that weekend.

But I feel the pressure of failure on me about that thing. Because I’m not much of a leader and organizer.

It’s just no one was doing it.

We’ll see.

I guess the key is to try to not fail. To ask for help. Apologize. Make amends.

In the case of the event, the key is to plan and organize- and not get locked up by fearing what others think or will think. Get a plan together and chase it out. Sooner than later.

In the case of failed friendships- do what your heart says to do to make things right, or otherwise accept the altered status- and forgive yourself.

We’ll see.

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Image Credit: ‘Things to Come′ by capslockpirate via Flickr. Creative Commons license.