The story you tell in the first week

The move that does damage is generalising: not "this application did not work" but "I am not the kind of person these things work for". The first is a fact about one decision. The second is a claim about a whole life built on a sample of one — and it is the version that quietly changes what you apply for next.

So be strict about the size of the claim. Write down what actually happened in one sentence, with no adjectives about yourself in it. The discipline is not positive thinking. It is refusing to let a single data point become a theory.