Confess Your Errors
I walked by a guy on the street the other day and he was wearing this awesome t-shirt. It was charcoal gray and in big white uppercase letters, it said MAKE MISTAKES. I debated whipping out my phone and snapping a surreptitious shot, but thought that would be kind of odd and/or creepy, so I held off. Anyway, it got me thinking about something I think about a lot vis-a-vis my real life and my fiction: mistakes. We all make them because we are human, but the interesting part, for me at least, is whether we see them, own them, confess them. I'm not interested in being around, or creating, perfect people, but I am interested in being around and creating imperfect people who are aware of, on some admittedly imperfect and incomplete level, their own imperfections.
In the past several years, I've been humbled by certain things, loss being the foremost, and I've woken up to some of my own flaws and errors and I've made efforts to retrace my steps. Stripping drinking from my life has been a huge part of this overarching effort to own my stuff and to retrace my path to this point, and to recallibrate my approach going forward. I admire and respect others who are willing to take a close look at themselves and to identify their issues and work on them, but I have a hard time with people who do not seem to have humility to confess their errors and retrace their steps. I confess that this might actually be a flaw of mine, my growing intolerance of people who seem to have no interest in editing themselves or their lives.
Are you willing to confess your errors and retrace your steps?
