Tammy Letherer Today I feel like writing about mistakes. Heck, I’m even open to making some. Not that I haven’t already made my fair share. From the workplace to the home front, as a parent, wife, or friend, my mistakes sometimes include big life moments and, other times, small sweaty details.
A few come to mind: In 2010, I was hired to work for the U.S Census Bureau. I was a stay-at-home mom at the time and it was a perfect short-term, part-time job. Because I got the highest score on the entrance test, I was made a supervisor; I started the training session feeling pretty good about myself. There were a lot of rules involved, many of them about how to handle a large blue notebook full of forms. After nearly a week of training, I came back from a bathroom break only to be told that I was out. I had left the blue notebook in my bag under my chair and broken the most important rule: keep the blue notebook with you at all times. There was no room for mistakes, not even a bathroom.
But mistakes squeeze in anyways, any which way they can.
I’ve felt the teeth-grinding frustration of finding typos in my memoir manuscript after it was proofread by three different people.
I’ve written about the time I handed my teenage son his forgotten flip phone when he was standing in front of the school with his friends, obliviously humiliating him for not having a smartphone.
I’m admitting that I regret having the third glass of wine that led to a three-day migraine. And that buying that weird mango chia drink I thought the kids would like was a bad call, especially since it’s still sitting in the refrigerator.
All mistakes. Making them is inevitable, but the big ones (and, surprisingly, sometimes the small ones) cause a sinkhole of shame, embarrassment, regret, and that sick feeling that comes with screwing things up.
And that’s for the real ones. There are also the mistakes I only anticipate or feel sure I’m about to make. Those cause their own fear and discomfort.
This is all coming up because last week one of my clients was so discouraged in the rewrite process of her book that she told me she was giving up. “Let’s talk about the mistakes I keep making,” she said, and ended with “I obviously have no talent.”
Wow. That’s a bold pronouncement. I don’t agree with the assessment, but I get the feeling.
Now, if you know me, you know I love my feelings. I’m all about “the feels” and giving them free rein. But this type of feeling—this sense of disempowerment as a result of making mistakes, —has to be crushed. Especially in creative endeavors, there must be room to try and fail. And fail again. And maybe even make a failure look so damn good that people start to praise it.
Alexander Hamilton said, “A well-adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without getting nervous.”
I’m not sure I’ll ever stop being nervous about making mistakes, but I am making a promise to myself that I will at least keep extending a shaky hand to greet them. I’ll call them experiences rather than failures, and I hope you will too.
If nothing else, they make good stories. And good stories are everything.
