It doesn't matter how glowing 98% of my teaching evaluations are, the critical, mean, and fair but OUCH ones are tattooed on my heart. You could give me pages and pages of glowing feedback on my writing and I'm going to remember the typos, the mistakes I made with language, the parts that were confusing and unclear.
I thought that this was just my brain doing Brain Things TM but it turns out that this is a well known, research supported Brain Thing: negativity bias.
In other words, things of a negative nature will impact your psychological state and brain processes more than positive things, even if they were of equivalent intensity. You remember negative things more, you notice negative things more, you have a tendency to choose things that will minimize pain rather than optimize for benefits.
I saw it this week (not so) lovingly referred to as "the zit effect": doesn't matter if everything else is going really well, if you have a pimple, you're going to focus on it. And it happens to all of us!
If you have a zit, there are a few options:
Pop it - bold! Not always advisable! Should probably be supervised!
Cover it up - takes a certain skill with makeup, not always fully possible, can sometimes prolong the zit
Ride it out - accept it, try not to mess with it, let it go down in time
Take preventative measurements - get soaps, get a routine, try and stop them before they start
But the truth is that all of these methods have pros and cons, and nothing completely stops zits from happening. And they look different for each person, they can range in severity, they can be part of a whole separate condition and need special attention, and you can't compare one person's zit to another - or tell them that "it's just a zit!" and that they should lighten up.
The useful thing here is to check in with yourself the next time you're in a thought loop about how you never get anything done, or are a terrible writer, or are just a trash raccoon in all areas that cannot be rehabilitated to be a cute, fun raccoon: are you focusing on all the things that aren't working?
Practice countering those thoughts with any reflections this week about the things that are working. It doesn't make the negative things go away, but it does "right size them" - puts them back in the correct scale so that you can see the face for the zits, so to speak. <3