Flunking my Anthropic interview again

the internet is not your friend, but a kind of alien intelligence - vast, cool, and unsympathetic, in HG Wells' formulation. Publicly melting down (even anonymously) is not going to help you; if anything, you'll just end up feeling more isolated.

You need to work out your self-image issues with a person instead of projecting them onto your environment. That person might be a friend of therapist, or several people helping you with different things, and finding the right person(s) is likely to involve several false starts and blind alleys. You should pursue this work in person. Parasocial relationships are a necessity in this day and age, but over-reliance on them is ver bad for your mental health.

I normally don't publish sappy essays like this, but I wanted to try sharing a common experience of rejection with a loud call for optimism and self-growth. I'm still learning how to be an authentic/vulnerable person, and I may have missed the mark

I like myself now. I really do. But sometimes that old self-doubt comes roaring back and I have to beat it down with a stick. You're totally right -- internet strangers cannot beat those feelings down for me.

By the time I published this, I was already back in a great headspace and moving on to the next thing :)

My hope is that somebody reads the essay and grows 1% more motivated to grab a stick and beat down their own self-doubts. I'll be sure to put that front-and-center in future essays