It was a pencil case that terrified me of making mistakes!
It’s funny how some of our sweetest memories can sometimes get forgotten as the years pass by while some of the bad ones linger for many years.
One day when I was a second grader, I waited with my mother for the yellow school bus with a big smile on my face but not because I was going to school. It was because when the door opened, I would be greeted by my favourite school bus driver. I can’t remember her name. I can’t remember anything about her or why she was my favourite but I remember how I always looked forward to getting on that school bus.
Perhaps, if I knew what was going to happen later that day, I would have pretended to be sick so that I could stay at home. In the first hour of being at school, the teacher demanded that we take out our pencil cases. This may seem like a simple request and it was. The problem started when I went through my backpack. I didn’t have my pencil case. I panicked. I started taking out my books one by one till I ended up staring at the nothingness inside my backpack replaying in my mind the previous night when I was preparing my backpack and the morning when I was packing my snack while contemplating eating it on the bus.
What’s the big deal, though? It’s just a pencil case.
The teacher saw me scrambling and praying for a pencil case to magically appear. My prayers weren’t answered and if miracles do happen, one would have definitely not taken place for a pencil case. At the end of the day, it was nothing more than just that; a pencil case!
He approached me slowly and asked me about it. I summoned whatever power a 7 year old could summon and responded that I forgot it at home. Before I could feel proud that I responded with the truth and took responsibility, he slapped me across the face and told me not to forget it again. I can remember the burning sensation in my left cheek and the buzzing sound in my left ear. I can remember the tears that overfilled my eyes only to get bounded by my eyelids afraid to flow.
There is no doubt that his response was extreme and this incident could definitely ignite a debate whether or not hitting kids should be a form of discipline but that’s not what this story is about. In my humble opinion, there is never a good reason to hit a kid. Period. This is not a debate. But I am sure there are many people out there who would say otherwise and I am not interested in debating this.
While this is definitely not the worst thing that could happen to a 7-year-old, it certainly affected my life. When I got home from school that day, the first thing I did was to put the pencil case in my backpack! I was very confused. I must have done something bad. It was me. I messed up. This couldn’t have been only about a pencil case. It must have been the act of forgetting, or perhaps it’s the lack of preparation. It was a mistake. That’s it. He slapped me to discipline me; to teach me that mistakes are costly. He wanted to inflict physical pain on me so that I could learn that I shouldn’t be making any mistakes; that I should never make any mistakes. I needed to understand why I was hurt. Why I was in pain. I needed a reason to justify what happened.
That was the day when I was brainwashed to believe that mistakes are bad and they indicate failure. Mistakes are horrible and only made by ignorant people who lack the knowledge and the wits to know better. That was the day I was misled. That was the day when a pencil case terrified me of making mistakes.
This story is true. It’s not a figment of my imagination or a false memory. It’s a reality. It’s how I ended up always trying to be in a well-controlled path. It’s how I ended up in a bubble, afraid to try new things and explore. It’s how I stayed away from anything unfamiliar and unknown. It’s how I became terrified to make mistakes. It’s the end of my courage and the lining of my safety net.
Up until my mid-twenties, I lived through life afraid to make mistakes and ashamed of myself to admit when I made one. Making mistakes is just a part of life though. I had to improvise. I resorted to blaming others for my mistakes. I blamed the environment. I blamed the timings, I blamed the circumstances and I blamed God. It was never my fault. The kid who got slapped for admitting the truth and owning up to his mistake no longer made mistakes and therefore it was always someone else’s fault.
That kid never got a chance to learn the true lesson. Perhaps, the slap blinded him from seeing the truth because it is OK to make mistakes. It’s OK to be at fault. Mistakes highlight our imperfections. Mistakes remind us that we can never become perfect. They remind us that no matter how much we sometimes feel like we have it all figured out, we are always lacking. We are always in a constant state of depreciation and deteriorating. Our memories fade away, our knowledge gets outdated and our health diminishes. Mistakes prove to us that we need other people to fill our gaps, that we need other people to form a team. Mistakes provide us with the opportunity to learn and correct our biases and false interpretations. Mistakes help us grow and mature. Yes, they also cause failures. They could cause you to get “slapped for a pencil case”. They might cause you to lose money, relationships, effort or even your health. That’s why you have to accept that making mistakes is OK. If you accept that, you can learn from them. You can redirect your energy from dwelling over your failures to learning, pivoting and improvising. Mistakes and failures are and have always been the greatest teachers of all time.
I am not that kid anymore. I do not dwell over my mistakes and try to pack my pencil case in my backpack when it was too late to do so. But even though, I am not afraid of “forgetting my pencil case”, I still find myself sometimes afraid of getting “slapped” and that’s OK. As long as my fear doesn’t hinder me from progressing, that’s OK. As long as my hesitation doesn’t bring my imagination and curiosity to a halt, that’s OK!