This is a fine, brave first draft: it tells us what we are working on and it endows the writer with the power of honesty.

The route to improvement—because this is an exercise in making the map by exploring the terrain—is to push further into the unknown. In an exercise like this, that means further into the unknown inside. We need to get within the atomic particles called "the best" and "failure."

Unlike the life of the schoolchild, the life of the grownup doesn't have any use for best. All great lawyers are different, none is the best. All great marriages, or other relationships—Tolstoy to the contrary notwithstanding—are different, none is the best. If you have a best child, you are not the best parent. Money being a psychoactive substance, it is best to have enough. Either more or less than enough is destructive. But only one can know for oneself what is enough. No one else knows best.

Failure is an attribute of human relationship, or else—as Ambrose Bierce defines "accident" in The Devil's Dictionary—an "inevitable occurrence owing to the operation of immutable natural laws." If your children know you think they've failed, then your relationship contains the failure. If you convict yourself of failure, then it is your relations among self-states that have suffered the collapse. To fear failure is actually to fear that our relationships with the people we need will fail; it is not illness, pain, or death that constitutes failure, but rather to feel deprived of love.

When we cry seemingly out of nowhere, it is often because a self-state that is accustomed to being unrecognized discovers she has been seen, has been spoken to, is cared about. That has happened and—as your draft eloquently shows—a conversation among selves has started. Improving that dialogue improves more than an essay. I look forward to reading the next draft.