Venting about not being able to do stuff

[lilmutegirl]

Lately, my self-confidence has been all over the place, but mostly down...today is no exception, and, in fact, epitomizes the reason for my lack of confidence. Often, when I attempt some task (usually something that other people may find mildly to moderately irritating, but probably get through and move on with their lives), I fail. Not only that, but I seem incapable of doing 90% (I'm really not exaggerating) of the things I need to do to rectify a situation. I'm not talking about doing the laundry or dishes, but stuff that may come up infrequently, but should be a simple, fairly quick, fix. For example, on my plate today, I wanted to re-screw in the bracket thing for my curtains. I have attempted this numerous times before, and had temporary fixes, but finally (a few weeks ago), I went to the hardware store and asked for help. I bought the screw/anchor things that the employee suggested (I think he actually understood the issue). Today, I attempted it. One of the anchors went in crooked, and broke. It is not completely flush with the wall. I screwed the thing in anyway and gave up. Now, I am attempting to deal with the ink in my printer/copier/scanner. I have had trouble with it for years, but only the color cartridge, so I have just been printing things in black and white-no big deal. Now, the black cartridge is not being recognized...I even contacted the company last year, and they sent me a new color cartridge that I could not get to work. It could be that there is some problem with the printer, but I don't want to deal with that, and it worked fine the first couple of years, and the black ink worked okay the past couple of years...
It's just really discouraging that I set out to do something and it goes awry. No wonder I avoid trying to fix stuff. I feel incompetent, even though I don't think i am very dumb. There are a lot of other projects I want to do, but I worry about how they will turn out if I am having trouble with screws and ink...how can I possibly tile a bathroom floor??
Anyway, I just wanted to vent. All of the confidence of other people saying "You can do it!" doesn't mean much if I am actually incapable of doing something...and like I said, this happens A LOT to me, in multiple facets of my life. I think that is why I don't like trying new things.

 

[Sacrament]

It'll be hard and frustrating at first, but rewarding once you get a general grip on things. Next time you use a screw, you'll remember the one that went in crooked, and you'll do a better job. As for the printer, maybe it's actually broken, but there are tons of places where you can print stuff fairly cheap until you figure it out. I wouldn't go for the bathroom floor thing before you have an idea of how it works and how you plan to do it.

 

[kihira]

Hardware type fixes can be really frustrating and often go wrong, I'm fairly competent with these but I won't attempt them unless I'm in the right frame of mind - which is to accept that some shit will probably happen but I'll need to persist to get it done, plus don't expect a perfect job - so don't let that make you feel bad and do have a go at tiling after watching plenty of youtube clips :thumbup:

What brand is the printer and are you sure you're following the instructions correctly? also, have you installed the latest driver? Where I am, a new printer can be a cheaper option than new cartridges

As a random thought, the renovation shows on tv make doing stuff way easier than it is