Mistakes were made...probably by me.

I want to talk to ya'll about a common turn of phrase that shows up in the lexicon a lot. The term is "I fucked up". And I hear it constantly.

Wrecked your car?

"I fucked up"

Forgot about a job interview or a zoom meeting and now you're in hot water?

"I fucked up"

Missed your daughter's NICU team check up because she had a weekend-in-cancun level diaper that you had to change immediately as you were leaving, then got stuck in one of those gross concrete medical complexes where the GPS is shoddy, made a wrong turn, then had to hoof it across an enormous parking lot with said toddler on one hip and a clunky ass diaper bag on the other?

No? Just me?

We've all been there. But something I notice, and what worries me, is the way we use "I fucked up" to describe our

Here's how I see it; a fuck up is irreparable. A fuck up is putting salt instead of sugar in your chocolate cake batter and not realizing it until it's been fully baked. That right there, that's a fuck up. Cake goin' straight in the trash. You cannot un fuck that cake.

But a mistake - well, a mistake is something we can learn from and potentially even remedy.

A mistake is coming up with 6 instead of 9 on the math quiz.

A mistake is forgetting someone's pronoun.

A mistake is putting pickles on the burger when they specifically said no pickles.

But if you crumple up and throw away your quiz, how are you going to learn where you went sideways? And if you don't learn from the quiz, then you're likely to repeat the error on the test.

If you don't go, "oops, sorry Forest, I know your pronoun is 'she' my bad. I'm still learning" then you'll probably do it again the next time and risk fixing the wrong pronoun in your memory.

And for the love of Pete, you can just take the dang pickles off the burger, it was a mistake.

Right?

My concern with "I fucked up" is that it does this thing to our brains where we think we have to throw the whole person, or the whole interaction, in the trash. Or even worse, we believe the behavior was SO egregious, that we deserve to get thrown in the trash.

We believe that when we are not our best selves, we are trash.

This makes me super sad. It makes me sad because people are not trash, (yes, even your ex's, but that's a topic for another time) and when we make mistakes with one another, instead of apologizing or learning from said mistakes, we listen to the deep seated lie that we are inherently trash, which in turn robs us of the opportunity to fix it. Or at least try.

Or, (most importantly) have loving compassion on ourselves so we can figure out why we lost our shit, or made that hurtful joke, or poked around on someone else's social media looking for tea, or WHATEVER, in the first place. And maybe things did go so south you can't fix what was broken with someone else. Maybe that relationship has reached its expiration date and that's really just what happened. Or maybe you were rude to the customer service rep from Waste Pro on the phone and you'll never get the chance to tell them that you were simply experiencing postpartum depression and really, really hungry at the time. (No? Just me?)

But you can always, always, learn from a mistake. The kicker is, you have to be willing to lovingly sit down the part of yourself that did the thing, look it in the face and say, "honey, I saw what you did there. I know you were feeling [angry, sad, lonely, scared, triggered, hungry] and you did something you regret. It's ok - you're not trash, you're not a piece of shit, you are a wounded human being with baggage doing your absolute best. Yes, that was regrettable. But maybe we can think about what happened and what we can do differently next time?"

Do I sound like I'm talking to a child? SURE DO! That's right folks, you guessed it....

It's called "parenting your inner child" and you have GOT TO LEARN HOW TO DO IT. It sounds hokey and cheesy and all that but frankly, if you can't be weird and cheesy alone with yourself, than really, what's the point here people? I'm not saying you need to update your facebook status or post a TicTok, just be nice to yourself about what you did. This is the only way to figure out maybe why you did it, and what you can do differently in the future. If we do not perform an autopsy on the interaction, we'll never know what killed it. And we risk doing the same damn thing in the future.

It's super hard. I'm not saying it's not. But please, be nice to yourself. Sit yourself down, like you would a child that you love a whole bunch, and say, "hey, buddy, what's going on in there?" Then really listen to the answer.

You are not trash, and you are not a fuck up. You might have been a bit of an asshole, but that is not the same thing.

It's gonna be ok. Cross my heart. And go click that TikTok link above, I made a thing for ya <3