We’re coming up on a new year. Every end of the year, I start thinking about all the things I want to do differently in the next year. I’m not alone. There are many who calendar their plans and identify their goals and form a solid map to becoming an improved version of themselves.
Lately I’ve been thinking a whole lot about being wrong. My second son, who is a bit of a perfectionist, has been disappointed with a couple of his grades this semester. He’s got all As, but he wanted higher As. He analyzes every worksheet that comes home, scouring it for the questions he answered incorrectly, beating himself up for what he calls his silly mistakes.
But mistakes, we tell him, are simply opportunities to learn and do better.
I didn’t always believe this, of course. When I was a kid, I had a fear of failure, too. I had a father who’d left, a mom who worked a lot by necessity, and a wide open space to stretch out into perfectionism. Perfect became the main goal of my life. I wanted to be perfect in everything, which left very little room for being wrong.
I used to think that being wrong meant something important—maybe it meant that I didn’t know enough, that I wasn’t smart enough, that I didn’t have anything to contribute to the world after all. Who wanted to listen to someone who was wrong?
In my mind, if I was wrong, it changed everything about me. I was no longer me.
There is still a vivid moment in my past that stands out to me as a defining moment, a change in trajectory. My final year of college I worked as the editor-in-chief of the college newspaper. One of my editorial cartoonists had brought in his cartoon for the next day’s paper. My gut said the cartoon was a little violent. I don’t remember the specific details of this cartoon, but I do remember, or at least I think I remember, that there was a professor in a classroom and a student holding a gun. Maybe the student was pointing the gun at the professor, or maybe it’s gotten worse in my memory, a symptom of guilt and its dangerous counterpart, shame.
I told this editorial cartoonist to draw me another cartoon—I couldn’t use this one. I had no backup plan, so it would simply be a blank space in the newspaper if he couldn’t draw another. Of course he didn’t have the time, or so he said. I called every cartoonist I knew, trying to find someone who had a cartoon I could use instead of this one. No one was home. And because I was on deadline, I gave the go-ahead to the designer; we’d deal with the fallout, if there was any, in the morning. I was probably being too cautious. It was already 1 a.m., we were tired, and I had an 8 a.m. class the next day. Those aren’t excuses, only reality.
The next day the university exploded. Or at least that’s what it felt like to me. I had more emails in my inbox than I’d gotten in four months of working as the editor-in-chief. My voicemail was full. The publisher, a journalism professor at the college, was waiting in my office when I got there.
This story ends somewhat happily. I didn’t lose my job, no one got hurt, and the publisher told me that everyone makes mistakes. I knew better now, and he knew I would make a better decision next time.
I couldn’t believe he hadn’t fired me. I wrote my apology for the next day’s paper, probably shifting the blame a little, even though I should have taken it fully upon myself. But I carried the shame of this failure for a long time. The first time I mistakenly spelled a name wrong in my adult newspaper job, I thought I would die.
I didn’t.
I know more now about failing, making mistakes, and being wrong. I know it doesn’t change who you are or nullify all the good you’ve done in the world. I know it doesn’t end you.
Here’s a handful of things I’ve been wrong about over the course of my life, in no particular order:
1. After three children, adding a child is as simple as pulling up another chair at the table.
2. I can handle my anxiety without medication, because I’m strong enough. And I’m a Christian. And there is no fear in love.
3. Anorexia is not a mental illness.
4. Demanding blind obedience from my children is the best way to raise good humans.
5. Suicide is a choice. And related: Christians do not contemplate or successfully commit suicide. God is enough.
6. Working toward a race-free society does not require reparation for the past. History is history. We should all just move on.
7. History has nothing important to teach me about my current reality.
8. Calling out someone else’s sin is my duty as a Christian.
9. If I’m wrong, it says something about who I am.
My relationship with being wrong has changed. I know something important now: being wrong doesn’t change who I am at all. I am human, and if humanity has any kind of talent at all, it is a talent for being utterly and superbly wrong, at any given moment in time.
I do not, after having lived, loved, and listened (mostly well, I hope, though not always), believe any of those things on the above list anymore. My beliefs and world views are constantly changing, evolving, transforming radically, in some cases. I do not, nor will I ever, know everything. I want to recognize this always, in every conversation. I want to embrace the full measure of humility—enough, especially, to say, at any point in the course of my life, “I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”
And maybe this is how love wins.
Happy holidays and the most wondrous of news years to you.
