Unlearning Unhealthy Ideas About Mistakes
Learning it’s okay to make them
In Liberty Forrest’s June 25th newsletter-ish, (yes, I’m late to the party as usual) she talked about mistakes, and the amount of memories that flooded my brain was almost overwhelming. It also made me happy because ideas swirling in my brain and writing make me the happiest.
Of the memories that really stood out, it was the unhealthy idea that my parents created about not making mistakes. This led me to some debilitating moments of perfectionism. Funny thing, they are two of the most imperfect people I know. Aren’t we all? But as perfect as they tried to appear and tried to make me think I needed to be, I made some colossal mistakes. Not that I made them on purpose. There was never a conscious effort to spite them.
My earliest memory of my mother’s idea that you shouldn’t make mistakes was of a painting in process that she’d left on the kitchen table. I got into one of the colors and painted a small section in one corner. I could tell she was pissed off, but tried to hide her true feelings in the face of a family friend. She also tried to cover up the color I’d used. The friend said it looked like a shadow, and to leave it as is. The painting hung in my bedroom for years. I can only guess it was so the friend wouldn’t question where the painting went if she hadn’t kept…
