(Nimue)
The biggest source of anxiety for me, is the fear of making mistakes. When I've got my teaching hat on, I encourage people to be relaxed about giving things a go and not worrying about the outcome. Mistakes are necessary for learning and growth.
Most mistakes are not disastrous. For most of us, most of the time, lives are not at stake if we get something wrong. Innocent mistakes should be easy to fix, especially if you want to fix them. I'm deeply invested in learning, understanding, and doing better.
And yet here I am with a level of anxiety that can be crippling, about what will happen if I get something wrong. The fear of the catastrophic outcome, of the disaster. I didn't get here by myself. Being blamed for things I've had no control over hasn't helped. Having other people treat problems as disasters is part of it. Dealing with people who treat honest mistakes as deliberate malice, and who punish accordingly has been a thing.
Tangled up in this is a sense that my mistakes come from being an intrinsically terrible person. Again, I didn't get there on my own. The question that underpins the anxiety is whether I have been misled on this score, or whether the people who have been most critical of me were speaking fairly based on experience.
This is tricky. Everyone has their own perspective and we don't all view the world in the same way. People acting from undealt-with trauma can get things horribly wrong. How responsible is a person for the consequences of the trauma they have not tried to deal with? At this point I'm fairly confident that there has been deliberate malice in the mix in my life as well. How much trouble have I caused when acting from my own trauma? I've not been great at holding boundaries – would things have been better if I'd been more sure of myself and clearer about what was not ok? Impossible to tell.
I've tentatively come up with a way of thinking about this. It's an approach that allows me to be kinder to myself in face of mistakes. I think it will also help me work out where to stay engaged with people and where to back off.
We all make mistakes. Some of us, for reasons of history and wounding, neurodivergence, mental health issues and more have a harder time learning and growing. Getting to grips with things can be slow. So I want to draw a line at trying to do better. Any sign of wanting to understand, learn, improve, heal, and get to grips with life's inevitable challenges, is where the bar is set. A good person is a person who is trying to get things right and who cares. It's not a high set bar.
I also acknowledge that you can't do any of those things without information. The scope to do better is informed by our relationships. If you aren't getting any insight as to what would work, or improve things, if there's no help, no clarity then it can't be wholly your responsibility. There are certainly people for whom there are no right answers. I've lived with that. If there is nothing you can do to get things right, then you end up feeling like an utter failure, but at the same time, that's wholly unfair. Having to magically know how to get things right with nothing to go on, is also wholly unfair.
Give me a chance to do better, and I'll do better. I now think that's enough.
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