There is a childhood cartoon I remember from the Electric Company or Sesame Street. The internet being a marvelous thing, I have recently learned that it was part of series of shorts called, “The Most Important Person”. And the one that haunts me is a video about making mistakes. “Oops, I made a mistake, that’s all,” the song went, “And making mistakes is never fun.” Some years back, probably when YouTube was a babe, I found it online and no sooner had I hit play than I burst into sobs.
I’m sure there was a lot going on at the time.
I’m well aware of the fact that when it comes to the concept of “mistakes” I have a shipping container to unpack, being caught up as I am in the Sisyphean cycle of striving for perfectionism and then being consumed by self-loathing when I fail. I grew up around people who believed there was a correct way to fold towels, as if the correct way to fold a towel wasn’t just to fucking fold it so you could get on with your life. I am also a woman in America in 2024 where you are considered inferior unless you are perfect and then when you are, you’re “over-qualified.” And I’ve known my share of toxic people where there is one set of rules for you and one for them.
Because I’m more than aware of my own personal history that contributes to my fear of making mistakes, I had never considered our world at large and how it may exacerbate this as well. So, it’s only dawned on me recently that we don’t live in a society that allows for mistakes. Our world is designed to be a binary between good and evil and mistakes are neither. Many of our brains aren’t set up for such nuances. And our systems definitely aren’t.
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