Failure and success

I struggle with self esteem from time to time, and by that I mean pretty much all the time. There is some justification to those feelings of failure. I am 36 and deliver pizza for a living, I personally am responsible for about a decade of my families' finances being wrecked while running my business into the ground, I have a pretty checkered history with school, am extremely overweight and right now I am whining about it on a blog no one reads at 1:30 AM after staying home all day because I am coughing too much to stand up for more than a couple minutes at a time.

All those things I said are true and I have made a number of mistakes, both through ignorance and through laziness/selfishness that have hurt me and those I love.

But.

There is a difference between knowing places you have fucked up, and feeling worthless, the two things aren't the same and the brain lies to you.

Let's rephrase, I am 36 and in that time I have learned a lot of different things in a lot of different jobs, I can make a latte, clean a deep fryer, organize and lead small groups of people, have a reasonable grasp of accounting and a number of programming languages, successfully started a business and ran it for two years, write decently, am making money in my current job at a rate to finish digging my finances out of that hole, and have the freedom to take off work when I am sick, to an extent anyway.

What exactly does it mean to be a failure anyway? I have failed at things it is true, but what is it about the state of my life now that is somehow not up to par? What even is "par" in this situation?

Part of it for me is not knowing what I want to be when I grow up, I have never really known the answer to that, I've never really felt a calling of any kind and so never forced myself to do something I didn't like to meet that calling. There's a societal expectation there that I am not meeting and that has I am sure been part of the reason I never had a career to speak of.

I don't want kids, there's another societal expectation, I just don't really like them all that much. This doesn't mean I don't think some kids are cute or whatever, and I'll do my duty to the extent that I can when it comes to protecting children from danger and so on, but I don't really want to raise any myself, or to share my space with them. Raising children I think requires a level of self sacrifice that to me is not worth the reward, if I get put in the position to do so I will make that sacrifice, but I won't like it and if I have a choice to not do so then I will make that choice.

Right now I work a job I don't hate and gets me a pretty good income, but it isn't an identity or a calling, and I don't have or want kids, so I am just sort of... getting by. But why can't that be enough?

I think the main reason I struggle with feelings of inadequacy is that practically speaking, it is enough, by the metrics I set myself I am succeeding, I have (some)money, my own space, people who love me, a cat, things to do for fun. The only things I am failing at are things I don't even want anyway! And yet it still weighs on me.

It's infuriating is what it is.

This isn't a pity post, I am not looking for anyone to weigh in with how I am a good person and shouldn't think I am a failure, that is the point, I know all that! Or at least I tell myself I do, but knowing it is different than feeling it, you dig?

This ain't bragging either, I am well aware of the ways I have fucked up, although to be quite honest I would be interested to hear other people's thoughts on how I have done so if they have any.

There's a book series I read that has a recurring question pop up in an in universe book of it's own, that question is "What is the most important step one can take?".
It answers the question too, it isn't the first step, the second, or the last, turns out the most important step is the next one. That brings me comfort, trite though it may be. I am not a failure until I die one, and all it takes to stop being a failure is to take one more step, metaphorically speaking of course.

I can't be the only one who struggles with feelings of inadequacy, what do the rest of you do, how do you trick yourself into being okay with things you really have no reason to feel bad about to begin with?