… Or how do you destroy your life, little by little…
There is nothing more significant in destroying your self-image than starting something, with all the hopes and aspirations it takes to start something and abandoning in before it is finished.
Even if you knew yourself as a great person deserving of the dream you set out to accomplish with the project, by abandoning it, by leaving it in the middle, you declare yourself as undeserving, someone less than a match to your dreams.
When you don’t finish a project, you set yourself up for more of the same, it is a self-strengthening cycle.
It’s all downhill from there. You continue life with a lot of your life force lost to that incident. Now you know yourself as someone who can’t be counted on. Your experience of yourself is that you are a failure, a wannabe, and you hate yourself.