Our modern woman-ness sometimes seems to be built on competitive honesty and an insistence that we are failing; self-deprecating as if it was an Olympic sport, with medals.
We see others in the mirror in the morning, not just our failing selves.
I read the "8 easy step" books and felt like I was failing self-help and bliss.
The group was diverse: I spoke with a 39-year-old managing director of a large investment bank, a failing self-employed photographer, a millionaire entrepreneur, and a Fortune 500 CEO.
He is not only, in terms of his achievements, the most "consequential Kennedy", as he has already been dubbed; he was also the most fascinating study in human failing, defiant self-belief and self-protection – by birth and family influence far more above the law than ever Nixon could have dreamed.
"The argument of 'you're probably just a failing or self-hating hipster'?
If the book has a fault, it's that Mr. O'Brien bustles affably, nostalgically, unstoppably on, giving an unneeded list of performers here or a goggle-eyed description of a house there, and rather too often failing to self-edit.
If Chen Rong-yu's death in that New Taipei cafe was a failing of self-discipline or some other non-biological defect, then it's important to establish that his heart attack wasn't due to a pre-existing medical condition.
Alarmed that Bea, at 4 feet 4 inches tall and 93 pounds, had developed habits like scarfing down "adult-size plates of food" and failing to "self-regulate" at the preschool snack table, Ms. Weiss placed her on a strict diet, cutting the size of her dinners in half and banning almost all desserts.
You either close your eyes and, many hours later, open them, or you endure an idiosyncratic epic of waiting, trying, failing, irritation, self-sabotage and despair, then stand up at sunrise racked with war stories you don't have the energy to tell.
A child -- in the eyes of the law, and a woman were not deemed worthy of the right to liberty, free passage, and failing that, self-defense, in their own country.
