Ability as a misconception? A way out of paralysis because of pressure to perform

I myself am afraid of admitting and showing strengths of mine. That has nothing to do with modesty or even insecurity. No, this is all about fear and convenience.
What am I afraid of? Admitting strengths of mine puts a certain pressure on myself – to live up to and fulfill my own expectations. Showing them to others spreads those expectations among more people, though I don’t really care what other people think. The first and highest hurdle is my own.
But there’s a further momentum that adds up that kind of fear and that’s the fear of losing in. This momentum is set apart from the pressure of expectation that it has a time dimension which renders it rather negative and destructive: In the view of expectation anxiety one failure can be interpreted as a bad trial, but in the eyes of someone thinking of losing in, this is just the first step to a spiral of destructivity. You’re doomed to succeed as the first failure inevitably destroys everything. Of course, in such a mentality one tends to shrink back more and more from challenges the more he has achieved, which inevitably paralyses one’s own advancement.
At this point, let me refer to that awesome movie “Fight Club” (again) and point out another important message: “You have to lose everything before you can make that next step ahead”, Tyler Durden says before he starts disfiguring his and his combatants faces. People in that movie have ended up in such a paralysis of fear that there was no way out but mutilating themselves.
However, also in the shade of this movie, allow me to make the case that this paralysis of advancement because of itself is not as much a psychological as socio-cultural phenomenon which is perfectly mirrored in our current Zeitgeist of “succeed or die”-attitude. And now let me please draw the example of traditional Japanese thinking to confirm this thesis of mine.
I claim that the self-conception in traditional Japanese thinking bared the aspect of ability! Yes, indeed, in my eyes, traditionally or at least originally, Japanese didn’t think to be able but only to have the possibility to do something! Just think of: It’s not due to your capabilities that you manage to learn a language, but the environment and its conditions that grant you language proficiency. In this sense, it’s not an achievement of yourself but a benevolent influence from your surround. This also indicates that the environment can take that achievement from you again.
How do I come up with such a plain assertion anyway? Well, again by considering language as a mirror of thoughts – as well as thinking! And now tell me, dear reader with Japanese proficiency, how do you translate “I can speak Japanese” into Japanese? There’s no other way than “（私は）日本語が話せる“ or „（私は）日本語ができる“ – plain and simple, huh? Well, tell me then why in both cases, 日本語 is grammatical subject and not 私は! It’s not me (subject) that is able to speak Japanese (object), but Japanese (subject) that makes itself speakable! As this example is still a bit ambivalent, let’s pick up that できる and look at it in the context of „友達ができる“. Do you really think that this means “I can make friends.”? As an ability? Finally, at this point we realize in our own (Western) mothertongues, that making friends doesn’t rely that much on our own effort and skills, but the benevolent surround and contribution of others. I myself always took offense of a friendly “始めまして、友達ができたいです。“ (“Nice to meet you, I want to make you as a friend of mine.“) as I simply thought “Hey, that’s not in your power!” And that’s exactly what the whole 可能系 in Japanese indicates: After all, it’s not in our power. Now this still doesn’t convince you? Well, look at the verb “得る“ then. This actually is nothing but an alternative to the construction of the 可能系 with 助動詞. In fact, I personally guess a close etymological relation but linguistics will have to tell me how these two ways of constructing 可能系 are related. Fact is that „在り得ない“ is a (still) common expression for „can’t be“ and that in Classic Japanese, “得る“ was used much more often to express possibility. So why not ability? Because the Chinese letter „得“ is reserved to possibility! In contrast to Japanese, Chinese do have an expression for ability which doesn’t use “得”, though. Why didn’t Japanese took over „得“? Probably because that’s the only expression they needed!
Now, of course, I don’t think that Japanese of these days bare any idea of ability. In fact, the persuasive concept of meritocracy somewhat would be in conflict with such an assertion. But that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have taken it over from foreign cultures! Just as it probably were the many foreigners learning Japanese that made Japanese themselves accept the grammatically incorrent “日本語を話せる“, Japanese might have got used to it themselves – supported by the ironic fact that Japanese linguistics have been under the shade of Western science ever since (as in other fields of studies like Corporate Governance by the way). And as Western theories have been so consistent, Japanese simply changed the practice instead of questioning the theory – which is completely against empiricism but the theorems of that concept are pretty questionable of not ignorant anyway.
So what’s the conclusion of all of this? You don’t have to disfigure yourself to get rid of your ego. You simply don’t have to take yourself that important and accept your lack of power even in your own “abilities”. As time passes and you age, environment or maybe that concept of life will take away again what it has given you.