Feeling grotty.

I'm just back from a conference that my friend organised in Oxford. I wasn't speaking at it: not good enough! I only managed to go to the first day as I had no voice the second day and am feeling pretty grotty still. My voice is sort of back but not great really still. I didn't go in today as I wanted to try and get rid of it and ended up spending most of the day in bed. Even now I'm looking forward to getting back to it. I have to go in tomorrow as someone from occupational health is coming to make sure my office is safe for me and then there's the school board meeting in the afternoon.
Most of the day I received reports for the board meeting: all the research groups submitted a report on what they'd been up to. I wasn't mentioned in ours other than as a welcome note. I went cold when I saw what people were up to and what they had been doing and what they had published and actually thought, and still am thinking, what the hell am I doing here. As much as anything it's having been in Oxford surrounded by people who are at the top of their fields whereas I'm not good enough to even be considered for weeding that field.
My friend has been in Oxford for over a year now and has coped brilliantly with the pressure to produce but not as well as she had thought or as well as she wants to. She now thinks that she's a failure as she's thinking of looking elsewhere. It's strange, my friends talk to me about such things but I can't open up to them. I told her it would be a bigger failure if she carried on until she made herself ill, especially as she recognises that other people seem to manage better than her. I also said that if she was a failure what did that make me seeing as I wouldn't even dare to go near Oxford or cambridge because of the pressure cooker type life that people seem to lead.
I even quoted the psychologist at her and said it was about being good enough and not about being the best; again she doesn't even know that I've had a stint of CBT.
I have to go and prepare a few tutorials: I can't believe they start next week.