Mistakes and Forgiving

This morning, as the kids ate their breakfast and brushed their teeth, I decided to squeeze in some work right before we left for school. Clearly, not a good idea, but I figured if I did it, I’d feel less guilty about going to the school meeting I wanted to attend.

I am assuming you already can tell how this goes…

In my rush, I made a simple, silly mistake that made it look like everything was broken. In my panic, I couldn’t see the mistake no matter how hard I looked. I finally asked for help from one of my teammates who told me there was something super-obvious I was missing. I kept looking but it might as well have been a blank page because no matter how much I looked, I couldn’t see it.

And then I saw it.

It was dumb. So super-dumb that it put me right into a huge shame trigger. I felt horrified that I’d bugged him over something so obviously dumb. In the middle of that, more things went wrong and I just kept panicking more and more. Yelling at my family to be quiet, still fighting to finish the task and making even dumber mistakes along the way.

I’ve written before about how when you’re in a state of reactive panic, your fight/flight kicks in and literally shuts down your prefrontal cortex where all the higher level thinking happens. And even knowing this, I just continued to live inside the panic state (and shame state) until the whole task was finished. At which point, I got dressed in under two minutes and was out the door with Jake and the kids.

The climax (or nadir) of this story is that I didn’t even end up going to the school event because I was feeling so super-crappy from the morning’s events. And then I started feeling shame around missing that and having let Jake down and having yelled at the kids. The shame from my coworker was also still live and breathing inside me.It felt like I was spiraling and every small or big event was contributing to the story I was already telling myself. It wasn’t just that I simply could not snap out of it, I kept feeding it so it grew.

This went on the whole day. I read blogs and found myself wondering how come other people could go through life achieving things they wanted and I just kept failing. Or, worse, not even trying. Wait, even worse, not even knowing what to try. I read work emails and made stories around those. On and on.

And here I am. It’s 4pm and I am still carrying the shame from 7:19am. The 2-minute issue that was resolved by 7:40 and had zero fallout. Yet I’m still holding on to it. Worse, I am still perpetuating it.

I want to stop.

I want to learn to be able to say “mea culpa, that was dumb,” and then move on. I want instances like this to not become identity-defining moments. Or even day-ruining moments. If there’s something to learn, I am happy to learn it and then move on. And yet, I am not sure how to do that. What I do know is berating myself for not knowing doesn’t help either. Telling myself to let go or being disappointed in myself don’t either.

So here’s what I am going to do: I will walk away from the computer. I will think of three things I am really grateful for right this minute. (Like my 4-year-old who is sitting next to me, giving me kisses, the perfect combination of sunshine and breeze in the backyard, and the wonderful package of art goodies I got today.) And I am going to go take a walk. Then I will come back and play with one son and help the other.

Sometimes the best path involves getting out of my head. Not trying to “figure it out” or “vent” but to reach out to others and to give and to rest and be kind to myself.

At least, that’s what I hope.