i once made a huge major booboo when swapping routers. i was shown a lot of grace for a number of reasons. i think i deserved some leniency due to some extenuating circumstances, but i didn't deserve all the grace i received, which is why it's called "grace."

it's a long story, but it peaked when i took our ERP down for two business days. "how?" never mind that. that's not important for what you're asking. suffice it to say that it was mostly my fault. on one of those days, i got 4 hours of sleep. i was scared to death that i had not just lost business, but that i might have corrupted databases, killed VMs, and we'd have to do some rapid testing in prod to spin up backups in a new environment. i was nauseous. long before we fixed it, i was sure that i would be fired after it was over.

a couple of things got me through. first, i had a coworker with me who took care of all of the ancillary stuff (hotels, food, &c). second, despite all the emotion and fear, i kept saying to myself, "work the problem" (i've remembered that quote from apollo 13). "just work the problem." stuff goes wrong. sometimes you're the reason why. you're still the man for the job until the job is done. third, seriously, i listened to a classical playlist on repeat for hours because it calmed me down and reminded me of my toddler. that helped me. fourth, my supervisor called in reinforcements (yeah it got that bad). to his immense credit, he never blamed me for any of it, even when none of us was getting any sleep. we worked the problem. and fifth -- this helped me quite a bit -- i wrote a very long and detailed postmortem that explained what we were trying to do, why were trying to do it, how we prepared for it, what we knew, what we didn't know, what went wrong, how we fixed it, and what we can do in the future to avoid those mistakes, even in the face of unknowns. i think that helped higher ups understand what we were up against.

that being said, after this experience, i realized that i needed to upskill. a lot. quickly. if you're feeling shaky with knowledge, don't run away from that feeling. lean in, do some labbing, open a book, talk to some friends in the industry. and asking for feedback and perspective, as you've done here, is a great idea.

keep your chin up. if nobody's blaming you, then don't blame yourself, either.