Self-doubt
Not good enough
You are somewhere you are not sure you belong. The others seem to know what they are doing. You are waiting to be found out, and in the meantime you are working twice as hard so that nobody looks too closely.
Marcus doubted himself constantly, and said so. He was slow, he thought, and not clever in the way the philosophers around him were. The passages below are his answer to himself, and they do not say that he was wrong about that.
Marcus Aurelius
If a thing is difficult to be accomplished by thyself, do not think that it is impossible for man: but if anything is possible for man and conformable to his nature, think that this can be attained by thyself too.
If a thing is hard for you, that does not make it impossible for a person. And if it is possible for a person, it is possible for you. The doubt confuses difficult with beyond reach, and he separates them in two sentences.
Marcus Aurelius
Another may be more expert in casting his opponent; but he is not more social, nor more modest, nor better disciplined to meet all that happens, nor more considerate with respect to the faults of his neighbours.
Somebody else may be quicker at the thing. He grants it at once. Then the list of what that does not make them: not more considerate, not more disciplined, not better with other people's faults. The comparison was on one axis, and it is not the one that matters.
Marcus Aurelius
Be not ashamed to be helped; for it is thy business to do thy duty like a soldier in the assault on a town. How then, if being lame thou canst not mount up on the battlements alone, but with the help of another it is possible?
And do not be ashamed to be helped. He compares it to a soldier who cannot climb the wall alone and can with another. The work is the point, not who did it unaided. Asking is not the admission the doubt says it is.
One question
What, in this, is actually beyond you, rather than merely hard?
Meditations is quoted from George Long's translation of 1862, which is in the public domain. The passages are chosen by hand, shown as written, and never paraphrased.