Mistakes
The autumn leaves, uh, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, hey, what's going on? Welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY!! I'm your host, The Wanz and I am experimenting with a new setup. So if it sounds kind of funky, it's because I'm putting some funk in it. How ya doing? You good? You made it this far. I'm very proud of you. If no one else says that, always remember, I'm very proud of you because you made it this far.
So, WANZOLOGY is a perspective-based podcast. And I have many perspectives, but they're all my own. And I don't expect that your perspectives will match mine exactly, but there will be similarities and those I encourage you to pay attention to. This week, we are going to dive, well, I'm going to dive (hopefully you'll follow me) into mistakes.
First off, right off top, let us recognize that we are human beings. Human beings, for whatever reason, are not, nor will not, ever be perfect. Ever. You feel me? Humans will not, cannot, ever be perfect. So, with that in mind, the question starts to become, how much expectation of success do you put on yourself at any given moment?
Me? Unconsciously, the answer is always. Always! I always put the expectation of perfection on almost everything I do and I always have. And the bad thing is, I don't pay attention to the fact that I'm human and that I will make mistakes. I've had to do a lot of, how they say, ‘work’ around this aspect of my being. Because if I fail at something, I That automatically means I'm not any good at it. And if I'm not any good at it, what the hell am I doing it for? Why did I even try? I fail at so many things. You see where the talk is going, straight down into the hole, straight down into that pit. And I have to remind myself, it's okay. You're only human.
When I was like nine and 10 years old, started having the chores, you know, take out the garbage, unload the dishwasher, uh, clean up after the, the pets. Feed the pets. We had a yard. So there was no like taking walks or anything like that. I mean, it was the seventies. We were heathens. We were Neanderthals compared to everyone now.
But, uh, it's funny. I look back on it now and I have no hypothesis as to why I would forget things considering they happened a certain day of the week, after I got home from school, I was supposed to do my chores. Invariably, I would get distracted by something, and I wouldn't take the garbage out, or I wouldn't unload the dishwasher, or I wouldn't clean my room, or feed the dogs, something. And by the time Mom got home, if something wasn't done, well, it was kind of a crapshoot what was going to happen. It kind of depended on what kind of day Mom had. If Mom had a good day, then she would just get a little frustrated, and not so gently remind me to go take care of it. If she was in a bad mood, if she had a bad day, then came the long lecture filled with Bible scriptures, usually having something to do with the book of Proverbs, restriction may have followed, not like I went out and tore up the town or anything, but I did like to go outside and maybe, you know, ride my bike around the block or play football in the street with some of the neighbors. And so being on restriction meant I couldn't go outside, or I couldn't watch television or something like that. And that would just tick me off. But the worst if mom had a really bad day and I was not aware of my role in the family and unexpectedly flashed on mom and backtalked, well then things would change. Then it was the smack across the face, the backhand and she would tell dad, which meant whooping was coming.
I wish I would have known about last will and testament at nine and 10 years old, I would have had like many copies because dad would whoop my ass!! Sassin’, back talking, not doing things that I was supposed to do made me sad. It made me feel like I couldn't do anything right. And I grew out of it to the extent of by the time I got to college, I wasn't like punishing myself, but I definitely was on my ass if I screwed up. If I forgot an appointment, if I couldn't remember a part in a song, or that I would call someone, or that I would show up and hang out, if I forgot something, I became very, very hard on myself.
It wasn't until after college, probably about five years after college that I really kind of hit a wall and really looked inward at myself and realized man. This has been a repeating pattern since I was like nine and ten years old, what's wrong with me? And that created my depression. That question, what's wrong with me? Why can't I? Because it seemed like everyone else didn't have this affliction of forgetting stuff. Everyone else seemed to be right on time. Remember when we said this? Remember when we went here? And I'm like, no, I don't. They do. And to this day, there are many people in my world. “Dude, do you remember back when we were doing this, and doing this?”, and I'm like, mm-mm.
“Do you remember the first time we met?”,
“Um, no.”
It's embarrassing. It's embarrassing. And I don't really understand it because it has been so repetitive. I'm not really sure of the pattern. I've been evaluated and cognitively poked and prodded, my cognitive abilities are average, just like the rest of me, but I still can't get around the fact that I worry the next thing someone's gonna ask me I'm not gonna be able to remember. And as I've gotten older, it's gotten worse. People that I've known for years, decades, I have trouble recalling their name, or a place, or the name of something.
Last year, I went and had a full-blown neurological test. Being that my mom passed away from Alzheimer's, I was really concerned. Is there something medically wrong with me? And after getting evaluated and the results coming back, I did have difficulty with recall. My short-term recall was a little below average. For a guy who suffers from depression and doesn't think much of himself already, that was just wonderful news to find out. And it took me about a week to work through it and accept it.
And when I say accept it, it's like, “Okay great, now that I know this, what do I do with it?”. Everybody has a suggestion: “Have you tried writing yourself notes?”, “Why don't you make a list?”, “Maybe you could put something in your phone, an alarm or something.”, and I'm like, “You know, did it ever occur to you that I've tried those things? It's not like you asked me if trying those things had worked before.”, which is another level of humiliation and self-deprecation. Obviously, I must be an idiot. I tried to write myself notes, but never could remember where I put the note. I had a list, but I'm not sure if I wrote it on my phone, or if I put it on a piece of paper, or maddening.
MADD-EN-ING!!
To this day, I have to be careful. I have to be careful because when I start talking to myself, man, I have lots of different ways of evaluating my-self two words. You ever do that? You ever like turn and knock something over and call yourself some sort of name, you are ‘this’, you are ‘that’. “Why were you so blah, blah, blah?”, and it was just an accident? Have you done it more than a couple of times? “Okay, why am I so clumsy? I'm such a klutz!”.
For you, probably, that's the end of it. But for me, it goes from, “You're such a klutz”, to “Why can't you do anything right?”,
“Why did you even bother?”,
“Why do you keep trying because you know you fail most of the time?”,
“You're not that good.”,
“You're not any good.”,
“You suck.”.
That's where my mind goes. And then I have to spend some amount of time digging myself out of that ‘pit’. And I mean, it's the equivalent of, I'm going to dig a three foot hole with a teaspoon…in clay. It's a lot of work. I used to have a little comic I cut out of the newspaper a long, long, long time ago. It's an elephant sitting in this tiny little vanity desk that girls get when they're young and learning how to put on makeup and checking out their face and whatnot. Big elephant sitting at this little tiny desk in this little tiny chair looking into a mirror and you can see the elephant reflecting in the mirror and at the bottom it says, “I must be worth the trouble I cause myself.”. I've had that for a long, long time. Maybe since junior high school. To remind myself, I am worth the trouble I cause myself.
Nowadays, I remind myself, because of the work I've done on myself, that making mistakes is inevitable. We're humans. Humans make mistakes. The question becomes, what did you learn from your mistake? I've done many thought experiments on making mistakes, and I always go back to this one, because it's the most common amongst American human beings. “Do you remember when you didn't know what 5 times 5 was?” And if you can, you say, “Yeah, I remember.”, Okay. Then I ask, “Well, do you remember when you understood how you figured out what 5 times 5 was and you explained it to someone else, and they got it?”, meaning that you explained how you learned it, they tried it and they were successful too! How did that make you feel? How did it make you feel to help that other person with something you learned and you were passing on your knowledge and experience? But it felt pretty good! NEWSFLASH!! That is the key to life as a human.
Life as a human is fraught with many similarities, yet we're all really different. And we process things differently, come to conclusions via different paths, it's amazing. 5 times 5. 25. Digging a little deeper, I figured out that there were a lot of things that were just like that. You probably don't remember when you learned how to walk, but your parents do. Your older siblings do. They've probably told you stories about when you were just getting started, and how often you fell down, and what you did when you fell down, and I have a question, “How much do you fall down now? Probably not very much. Which coined my phrase, “We don't learn how to walk, we just learn how not to fall down as much anymore.”
How many things have you learned? I mean really, how many times did you fail before you learned? How to make microwave popcorn, how much coffee to put in the maker, and how much water to make a good cup of coffee. How to make bacon, how to fry chicken, how to parallel park. You see all the things that we've gone through? As human beings, we are always going through something. But sometimes it's very difficult to take a minute and look at what you've learned, then give yourself credit for it. Especially after it's something that you learned a long time ago and have forgotten before. But now you've relearned it because you remember the last time you screwed up. My pops used to say, “Nothin’ beats a try, but a fail.”. It took me four or five years to understand what that meant. I was really good at trying and I was very used to failing. I was very used to not succeeding. And one time he totally came out of left field and said, “You know what I really admire about you?”, and at that time I didn't know that he admired anything about me. He'd never said something like that before. And I said, “No.” and then he said, “The thing I admire about you is no matter how many times you get knocked down, you always get back up. You always get back up.”
And I had to think about that for a long, long time.
These days, in the 2020s, 2024, I really have to think about it. Because the more mistakes you make when you're older, the more they cost you. Mentally, spiritually, monetarily. And if your head's not right, it'll take you out. And when I say take you out, I mean it'll put you in ‘the pit’, and they might as well throw dirt on you. You'll probably throw dirt on yourself. So I'm going to leave you with the most positive thing that I can remember in this work that I've done last year, there was a meme that kept coming across my radar and it was an advertisement, but boy is it useful.
It had a brother standing in there and a sweatshirt and the sweatshirt said, “Either I win or I learn. I never lose.”
“Either I win, or I learn. I never lose.”. And that my friend is something I would challenge you to stand in the mirror after you've brushed your teeth at night or in the morning or whatever. Stand in the mirror, look yourself dead in the eye and say that to yourself five times for five days, at least once a day.
What happens? Hmm. What happens? I wonder if your mind, your body, and your spirit kind of take on a new perspective on making mistakes. Because they're gonna happen. They're gonna happen. And it's not a matter of if or when they happen, as much as it's about, what do you do? What do you do to counteract the negative effect of a mistake?
“Either I win or I learn. I never lose.”, repeat it. Repeat it for a while right after you're done listening. It would be really interesting to see how your little mind experiment with mistakes turns out. Remember, we're all human and therefore fallible, which is a fancy way of saying we ‘eff up’ a lot. But it's about what you do after you've ‘effed up’!! THAT!! That is a very interesting question.
Thanks for another Wednesday episode of WANZOLOGY, I encourage you to keep it simple. Do your best then leave the rest.
All right? Take care of yourself. I will see you next week.
By-eeeeeeee!!!!