On mistakes…

This is the photo of a bad-ass mother who don’t take no nothing from nobody. #coolrunnings And who also makes mistakes. Sometimes, lots of them.

If we learn from our mistakes, why are we always so afraid to make them?

I asked this on my Instagram stories this week and got a myriad of answers from the need to control, to fear of punishment, to a “waste” of time. A few people thought along similar lines to what I’m going to share today, with their own personal flavours.

My thoughts of course as with all my best/worst lessons, include a real in-my-face lesson from my kid this week. You know your child is your mirror and your teacher, when the exact issue that you’ve been wrestling with is being brought to light in her life too. #thanksuniverse

But let me start with me. This moon cycle, as I’ve been working in the energy of the creator/destroyer goddess, it’s become painfully clear to me that one of my overarching themes throughout my life has been the need to be right and not make mistakes.

I hold – even with what feels like a bajillion years of therapy, personal growth, and spiritual work – tightly to this belief that if I’m right, then people will like me and I will be loved. And just as tightly I hold into the equal belief that the only way to be right is to not make mistakes. I know I’m not alone in this – I know that so many of us hold tightly to fear of getting it wrong, or looking silly because we don’t know something.

But what’s hit me upside the head this week is how many of my choices and actions have been fueled by this mis-guided sentiment that to be right will keep me safe. Again, this is not new insight. (To give context, Dan and I wrote our own wedding vows and I literally included the following in mine: “I promise to continue to learn that being right is not always the most important thing and to teach our children the same” so yeah.) But what is new for me this time is a much clearer understanding that this is truly the shackle that binds me. That if I do indeed seek the liberation that I claim to so desperately want – from my negative thought patterns, from my fears, from the old tape playing in my head constantly reminding me that I’m not good enough anyway – that laying this down and accepting a messy, mistake-filled existence is what’s on the other side of that.

So why has it taken me the better part of 39 years of holding on to this to come to the point of change? Partly my own context and wounds, of course. For the grander “us”, somehow I feel better imagining this is strictly evolutionary. If we look back to when we were living in tribes, closer to the land, it could literally be death to be kicked out.

But I actually think, especially as woman, that we really don’t need to go that far back to find it. As women, we have been conditioned and trained that we must “get it right” for thousands of years (for those of us with European lineages). Patriarchal rule first restricts women’s power by restricting our roles in the world, and for the bulk of that time, being a woman who “got it wrong” could have literally deadly consequences. Act “too improper”? Get shunned and ostracized, being forced to live lonely (or not survive). Try and push for a role outside “what’s proper (i.e., military, getting an education, working outside the home, be anything other than straight/cis, etc.)? Hope you like begging (and likely selling your body)! I could go on but you get the idea. Even now, in the lives of trans kids who can’t get access to safe medical care and women who can’t safely have autonomy over their bodies, we are warned at every turn to not “get it wrong”. Be that as it may, I am grateful my daughter is growing up now (and even she’s not immune).

Again – let’s lay it all out and acknowledge what is true. I LITERALLY named her after the creator-destroyer goddess Kali. #whoopsie Her existence in my life has really been a catalyst for me to both create and destroy and I only hope she can use that powerful energy in her own life as she grows up.

However! Because I see so much of myself mirrored in her (because of course), I see her struggle to the point of tears and tantrums in her fear about making a mistake and I see myself. Yesterday was a painful and beautiful example of that, as she stood in the kitchen literally paralyzed in fear about trying to do something she knew she could complete, but it wouldn’t be perfect – there would be many mistakes, even if it wasn’t a hard task. As I work to heal (actions that capitalism can’t add value to but FYI are actually really important) I am so grateful that the universe reminds me that I can’t just push forward and pretend I don’t know the work, or that “everything’s fine”.

So I work in ceremony, I meditate, I cry. I lean on my circle, I walk by the water, I take naps and read books and have baths. I work to speak up when I don’t always know the answer (trying to live my life this year by the attitude of a mediocre white man! Don’t know the answer? Who cares! Share your ill-informed opinion anyway! Take up two seats on the bus! The world is yours!), I work to share even if I’m afraid of how it will be received, and I work to create for my own sake rather than for someone’s approval. (That last one has been the hardest and the one I’m most proud of. Heck just look at this blog! Clearly I am only creating this for myself, given that it’s not even themed or “branded” well. And half the posts are basically just therapy for myself. Anyway, glad you’re here!!)

When I can’t find the self-love to do it for me, I do it for her. I do it for freedom and joy and the fullness of a life well-lived. Which isn’t Instagram-curated perfect, but tears and skinned knees and watermelon dripping down my chin, it’s weird angles and bad lighting, and more pictures of my dog than the world really cares about, and it’s jumping into the void and burning it down to start again.

I create a space, both in my head and in my home, where mistakes are not to be feared. Where mistakes – if not celebrated, can at least – hold neither good nor bad. Where mistakes exist in the simple truth, like today is Thursday. Today is Thursday and mistakes are. They just are.