Be gentler to yourself. You matter. Allow yourself to be a human. Don't be a slave to your tongue. Remember to enjoy. Your past is your past. Your mistakes have happened. They're OVER.
I wrote those phrases on index cards and taped them around my home desk a few months ago. It's the result of counseling I received during this trying year, the second stressful trying year of COVID for all of us. I think everyone could use some counseling during such crazy times, or at least have people who listen and give intelligent feedback in your lives. This counselor didn't necessarily say anything brand new, but I suppose at this stage I was ready to listen.
It took almost half a century, but I finally learned to stop being quite so hard on myself. That is a lesson I had to learn in order to stay alive. The stress of being a perfectionist know-it-all was affecting me and my relationships such that I didn't know how much more I could take before I started breaking down. Who knows how much damage I've done to myself to this point. But I've begun to look at life in a different manner. The old way of beating myself up for every shortcoming was not getting it done.
The result is that I don't take every angle of life and see it as a failure on my part. That's not to say that I don't recognize when I don't measure up or when I make a mistake. But I've tried to make the effort to stop seeing every mistake as some horrific personal failing that needs to be examined over and over. This life is one of examining and ruminating over mistakes constantly, as you can tell reading this blog. So it's not easy and more than a little weird to not beat myself up over errors. But it's a relief, and it allows me to enjoy life more.
Part of the adjustment is recognizing the voices in my head that try to bring me back to self-flagellation and just letting those voices happen without freaking out. For example, I received an error at my data entry job last week. I take great pride in not making errors. This was my first one in a long time, more than a year I think. I saw what it was and I know how I messed up--going too fast and overlooking a procedure. Normally that would ruin my whole day. I tried to forgive myself and let it go. But later that day I was chiding myself in an unfamiliar way. I was double-checking my work and this teasing woman's voice in my head kept saying, "Of course you're double-checking. You got an error. Mr. Perfect, who never makes mistakes, got an error. Ha ha ha." It wasn't aggressive, but more like a person taking joy in the misfortune of others, and I never heard that voice in my head before. It was the manifestation of my psyche needing to chastise me for a fuck-up, and since I didn't do it in my normal way--ruminating and cursing myself all day--it found a different way. But I recognized it and let it happen. As my wife has been advising me, I sat with my feeling instead of fighting with it or wrapping myself in it. It's such a different method than I'm used to. But I recommend it. Beating myself up didn't accomplish what I thought it would. I really did think all these years that those who are great at what they do kill themselves for every mistake in an effort to train themselves not to make the mistake again. And maybe some do that, but it didn't work for me. I would still make mistakes, and sometimes the same mistake, and I bet most everyone else does too. The sooner you learn compassion and self-grace, the less stress your spirit carries around. And take it from me, that shit's heavy.
