‘Just because you make mistakes doesn’t mean you are a mistake.’
An Event, Not an Identity
‘Just because you make mistakes doesn't mean you are a mistake’. There's a single word that changes everything, and most of us swap it without noticing.
“I made a mistake” becomes “I am a mistake.”
It's a tiny shift in language and an enormous shift in meaning. The first is about something that happened, a thing with a beginning, an end, and edges you can see around. The second is your verdict on who you are. And once you cross that line, there's nothing left to fix, because you've decided the problem isn't what you did. The problem is you.
The difference between doing wrong and being wrong When you keep the mistake as an event, you can actually work with it. You can look at what happened, learn from it, put it right where you can, and carry the lesson forward. The event stays the size it actually is.
When the mistake becomes your identity, it stops being one moment and quietly spreads across the whole of you. A single wrong turn becomes proof that you always get it wrong. One failure becomes evidence that you're a failure. And you can't learn your way out of that, because it isn't a problem to solve anymore. It's a sentence you've passed on yourself.
Where the unforgiven ones pile up
Here's what I've watched happen, in myself and in the people, I sit talk to. The mistakes we never separate from ourselves don't get dealt with and set down. They get stored in the dumping ground in the mind where we throw everything we haven't made peace with. Every mistake you turned into a verdict goes on that pile, and over the years it stops looking like a heap of separate moments and starts to look like a story: proof, in your own handwriting, of everything you think is wrong with you.
That story feels like the truth precisely because the pile is so big. But it was never truth. It was just a lot of ordinary human moments, filed under the wrong heading and never let go.
Getting it wrong is the human part
You will get things wrong. Not because you're broken, but because you're a person, and that's simply what people do. The most decent, capable, loving people you know all get things wrong regularly, you just don't hold their mistakes against their whole character the way you hold your own.
The goal was never to stop making mistakes. That's not on offer to anyone. The goal is to stop letting each one mean something about your worth.
What's one you've finally stopped punishing yourself for?
Somewhere in you there's probably a mistake you've already forgiven, one you can look back on now with something closer to warmth than shame. Notice how much lighter that one is to carry, now that it's an event again and not a definition. Then think of one you're still punishing yourself for and ask whether it really deserves to be the thing that says who you are. Chances are it's been on the pile far longer than it ever earned. And if it's too heavy to lift down on your own, that's exactly the kind of thing worth setting down with someone alongside you.
In my book “ Where The F*ck Do Our Minds Go,” I have a story of a crane driver I met on a building site who flipped a mobile crane. With everything that hqppened he thought he was going to get fired. The twist was, he ended up being the best crane driver for the company. Like the old saying says: “Out of adversity comes our greatest gifts.”
Be kind to yourself this week.
Michael
Need a hand? Book a session with me — I've been where you are.
There’s a whole book of this. Where the F*** Are Our Minds is on Amazon AU → https://getbook.at/WhereDoOurMindsGo More at michaelmalacos.com
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