Why do I wreck things right when my career starts to work?

You call it sabotage, as if some stranger crept in and did this to you. Look again. No one else was in the room. You chose to miss the deadline, skip the follow-up, pick the fight, disappear right when someone was finally paying attention. This is not a mystery. Success asks something of you — to be seen, to be counted on, to keep producing what you just produced. Some part of you finds that unbearable, so it finds a quieter, more familiar unbearable to replace it with. Failure, at least, you already know how to survive. What is in your power is not your history and not your fear. It is the next action, today, in front of you. You can feel the pull to undermine yourself and still not obey it. That is the whole task.