On Making Mistakes
I've made a lot of mistakes. It is humiliating to admit to myself, yet there is strength to admit it to others.
When I make mistakes, it's easy to chalk it up to the fact that I'm a human, I'm animal, and brush it off. But there's something more to admitting mistakes to others, something deeper about our humanity, something deeper about our connection to each other.
We are individual, but we are also collective. Sharing with others our mistakes spreads knowledge, it helps us as an individual to move past the mistakes, but also informs us collectively about what we want from ourselves. Telling one person about a mistake is not going to save the world, but it gets the ball rolling downhill. Once a critical mass of those lessons are learned, we can collectively make that next step forward in our ever marching story of progress.
In college, I smoked a lot of weed. Weed can be a good word because of how it took over my life, a thorny weed that sapped my nutrients and cut off circulation to the parts of me that bore fruit. Stoned and confused, my life began to fall apart. It started off with small things, misplacing my keys, dropping and breaking expensive things with greasy hands, or being too paranoid to see my friends. It was also big things, like not scheduling important exams and missing them. That spiraled me down into a big depression, driving me to give up on the class for the rest of the semester.
For a while I chalked all this up to "mistakes I made while I was high, because I was high", but what I didn't realize was that I would make similar mistakes like these all the time when I was sober, too.
I would always make the excuse that I made the mistake because I was stoned, and I stopped investigating the mistake there. "Stop getting high", I would tell myself, "and you'll stop making mistakes". But that's easier said rather than done. And if I stopped using, nothing would really change. No real lesson learned, nothing gained, still the same me.
But, one day, I realized that these mistakes didn't just happen because I was high; they happened because I am human. And humans make mistakes. I am just like everyone else. I'm not perfect, and I'm not supposed to be, but that doesn't mean I can't still improve.
Then, I could look for a lesson to learn from the mistake. A way out, a path forward where I improve my life, where I am not stuck to the person I have been, where I can free myself from myself. I can take action. This was a huge realization.
And the actions I took started off small, like making a home for my keys so I never have to think about where they should go. Or it would be more integrated actions, like getting better at planning for events and appointments with the help of a calendar. Or it would be more profound like stopping using marijuana and sober up. Being sober is exceptionally underrated in our world.
I wouldn't have made these changes in my life if I didn't take the time to reason that these mistakes were because I am a human and I make mistakes. I always chalked it up to me being high.
Making mistakes is normal
The more I reinforce the fact that I make mistakes often, the more I am thinking about how I can avoid making them again in the future. Either by simplifying my life, or asking for help.
Ultimately, my perspective changed from desiring to be perfect and always seeing myself as a failure, to desiring to improve and always seeing opportunity for growth.