Loving Your Inner Idiot

You can’t escape it. You know that feeling all too well. In that split second when you realise what you’ve done, that crushing sensation takes over and you’re desperate to find somewhere to hide. Some laugh it off; for many it’s a cue for a season of self-punishment; occasionally it triggers obscene defensiveness and outright denial. But we all know it.

Yep, you’re a dumbass. You’ve done something outrageously stupid in the face of perfectly good advice and your own internal common sense. Somehow you knew better and took the road far too often travelled — the one that leads to the lonely dual-grip vice of regret and shame. You should have known better. It turns out you’re just the same of the rest of us, and far too regularly indulge the frustratingly stupid part of you known with dubious affectionate as your Inner … Idiot.

Psychologists have written thousands of words about the wounded children we all harbour deep in the recesses of our adult hearts, but alarmingly few seem interested in addressing a much more common everyday syndrome. That dysfunction being our general unwillingness to forgive ourselves for making mistakes. And boy, had we all made some whoppers in our time.

Whether it’s sleepwalking into a bad relationship with the wrong person, picking the wrong battles that leave us heavily scarred, fouling it up at work, drunkenly injuring yourself whilst attempting over-ambitious at gymnastics, making the best angry speech you will ever regret, accidentally trashing the car, disastrous and ill-conceived make-up or fashion decisions, massive debts crashing in from last year’s spending sprees, inadvertently deleting twenty years’ worth of irretrievable information or even extreme medical malpractice, you are in good company.

You are not going to meet anyone walking this earth that hasn’t really, really, REALLY got it badly wrong dozens of times.

Imagine being responsible for some of these howlers:

• Henry Ford forgot to put a reverse gear on his first automobile.
• Decca Records turned down The Beatles.

OK, so maybe you haven’t screwed up to the level of millions of dollars. It’s more likely you’ve hurt yourself, someone else, lost something materially, had to eat humble pie or your pride has taken a real beating.

Your inner idiot is feeling bad enough. It doesn’t need any more punishment, being the poor bedraggled fool it really is. You’ve got to admit there is something playful and cute about the stupid part of you, whether it is the blissful naivety or the mindless cavalier nature of how when you really go for it, you do it in style. There’s no holding you back when you’re showing the world around you just how to do personal tragedy, or put on the fireworks of a skidding, dramatic social car crash. Celebrate your utter idiocy in the same style as you enthrone your wild successes, as one can’t live without the other.

Being dumb is to being clever as night is to the day. It’s sometimes the most important thing you can do in order to make changes in your life. Without your failures, you can’t recognise or enjoy your finest hours.

It’s important to be kind and sympathetic to yourself and your inner fool. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to be creative, to learn, or to connect to the rest of us as a human. Nourish him/her like a warm and welcome part of you and don’t reject that retard. Recognise it as a valuable and important part of you that’s welcome, loved and completely necessary. As you embrace it, you can be more at peace with yourself and won’t feel the need to crucify yourself every day for the asinine and ridiculous screw-ups you’re responsible for. Or comparing it to the shopping list of idiocy your friends probably have.

People have shorter memories for your idiocy than you do

That’s right. You’ll be bashing your own head in for years after the rest of the people who witnessed your indignity have long forgotten the disgrace. Thankfully we have so much information coming and going every day that 99% of us have so little RAM left in our heads that desperately needs to be used for more important things, like work and feeding ourselves. Even your most brilliant triumphs of complete stupidity fade away. Nobody will remember it in a few days, and nobody really cares. Not nearly as much as you do.

You weren’t born knowing exactly what to do

Nobody was born knowing everything. The best we can possibly hope for is someone else who’s been through the same thing and can help us out, and we wouldn’t listen to them anyway if we can learn the hard way. But oddly, for 3000 years, we all seem to mess up again and again like it never happened before. You probably should have got the information you needed, but you didn’t. You certainly have it now, and you can advise others, and yourself. Forgive yourself for not coming out of the womb with all the right answers.

Get over yourself and have a gut-laugh

Your pride took the biggest beating. And let’s face it, when you mess up, it’s with a real sense of grandiose occasion. Nobody does it quite like you do as the royalty of savants. Think of all the stupidity of the past and how you laugh about it now, as this too shall pass. In a little while you’re going to thinking about it exactly the same way. The wiser, stronger you is going to roll your eyes your younger self, just as you do now. It’s an ongoing process that rolls over continuously. You don’t get it right all of the time, so release the pain with a well-earned fat bout of self-deprecation.

There’s always someone who’s been even stupider than you

With 6 billion humans alive today, and thousands of years that have passed, someone is absolutely bound to have done it with more force than you have. Most of your friends will be able to name and quote their own spectacular misjudgements in great detail. Famous people did it in the glare of the press. Your parents probably made a bigger mess than you ever could and passed on wisdom so it wasn’t as bad, If you look far enough, you’ll find plenty of people who not just got it wrong, they were so insanely stupid that they impacted the lives of everyone around them.

Being a perfectionist is the worst kind of arrogance

Think about it. If you expect to be better than anyone else and never, ever get it wrong, you’re looking at things from a far superior and God-like standpoint. You believe you shouldn’t get it wrong and are above all us, the great unwashed and retarded. You can’t claim that — no-one can. You’re either one of us dumb people or you’re some kind of superhuman hero with special powers who is never going to fail or mess it up. You’re human, and to connect with other people it’s essential you understand how they feel and work, lest you live on a mental desert island.

If you don’t fail, you can’t learn from it or grow

Without road bumps, you’d live an unbelievably boring and stale life devoid of any colour or definition. Keep succeeding, and all you know is that things are going well, with no need to change them. Mistakes and screwing up teach you the hard way that you need to do things differently and give you new information to use in the future. If you don’t fall back on, you aren’t able to grow the courage of character or try again. No falling means no learning, no changing and no evolving. Without the drafts, failures and duds, the creative and discernment processes just don’t work.

Bad feelings mean your heart and mind are working perfectly

It’s natural to feel embarrassment, even if it’s not really logical or fair when mistakes have such a positive aspect. Guilt is the right and healthy response when you’ve done something wrong, and shame is what you feel when you feel wrong as a person. Your conscience is your emotional compass guiding you through the world, and your feelings are your ship sensors. If you are feeling any of them, it means you are functioning normally as you should. When they’re not, it’s a sign of serious mental illness.

Messing up helps us to empathise with others

To forgive someone you need to be able to see things earnestly from their point of view, no matter how much you disagree or reject how they see it. To accept others, you need to be able to share their weaknesses and your own need to be accepted. If you know how they feel, you can comfort and help them when they inevitably screw it up. Sometimes you don’t realise you need to change things until someone really tells you how badly you got it wrong. Mistakes give us the most valuable emotional commodity we can ever hope for: humility.

We forget to understand what the world’s greatest thinkers and achievers have learned the hard way: succeeding is a journey and a process, rather than a destination or a milestone in itself. We have come to see achievement as an event or a final conclusion, when conventional wisdom says we need to look at it holistically from a much higher perspective.

Thomas Edison famously claimed he had “failed himself to success”. Successful people fail far more often than unsuccessful people. You are defined by what overcomes you if you are not defined by how you’ve overcome them. Mistakes have produced some of the most creative and incredibly ground-breaking things for the world we never expected.

• Coca-Cola was a failure as a medicinal syrup.
• Post-it notes failed as a new kind of adhesive tape.
• Silly Putty was a failure as a rubber substitute.

Piccasso once said that all children are born artists, but the skill is in staying one. The process of being creative involves making mistakes, and being willing to make them. As a child, you had an intrinsic trait that you were educated out of — you weren’t scared to make a mistake. When you fell down, you got back up again. You weren’t afraid to give it a try, get it wrong, or try again. Somehow, we’ve managed to stigmatize getting it wrong as the worst thing you can ever do. Mistakes are arguably more important than success. The former is a teacher, the latter simply reinforces.

Take heart dearest reader. Yes, you have been dumb. You have plenty to feel sorry about, and lots of reason to feel sorry for yourself. Spend a little time thinking about it and you can really go to town on what a complete and outright fool you really can be when you are let loose on something important. If you’re going for self-pity, go all the way. Howl at the moon in absurd abandon if necessary, cry into your pillow, and hide your shameful head in disgrace. You are an idiot like the rest of us who needs to nurse that inner retard, and will always need to. It’s the part of you that ironically makes you a masterpiece.

If all else fails, comfort yourself with this well-known saying. “Make something idiot-proof, and someone will just invent a better idiot.”