Mistake or Not: Can You Guess the Right Answer?

Rather than writing about why regrets are more painful than mistakes we've made, which several Pens have already written beautifully about, today I'm giving a QUIZ about my mistakes and regrets.

All of the items below might appear to have been mistakes. But were they really? Can you guess the ONE question where the answer is that this was a mistake I regret?

GIGI'S POSSIBLE MISTAKES:

1. I bought a car because I loved it, even though I knew it was far from the most efficient or trustworthy car.

2. I spent the night in a sketchy Italian train station with my luggage straps wrapped around my arms so nobody could steal it if I fell asleep.

3. I dropped out of grad school, so I don't have a PhD I could have had.

4. I moved in with a man less than 6 months after we met.

5. I started taking my writing seriously in the year 2007.

ANSWER KEY:

1. Not a mistake. I wasted some money, sure, but I loved my VW Golf dearly, and wouldn't have done anything differently. Even with its seatbelt that broke repeatedly.

2. Not a mistake. True, I missed a train connection, but these things happen. I was backpacking with a friend at the time, so I wasn't alone. It wasn't the most comfortable night of my life, but it was one of the more memorable of months of traveling.

3. Not a mistake. It would have been a mistake to continue with the PhD. But I also don't think it was a mistake to start in the first place; I never would have had the opportunity to live in the fabulous cities of Seattle and Bath without this detour, and I did learn a lot about myself.

4. Not a mistake. 9 years later, here I am with the love of my life.

5. MISTAKE. Why hadn't I begun taking my writing seriously sooner? For far too long, I made the mistake of treating myself as a hobbiest with my interests related to "non-professional" pursuits. I tried out many majors in college, but it never occured to me that any art could be more than an elective. It wasn't until my late 20s that I figured out I could be a professional designer and photographer, and until my 30s that I realized writing novels could be more than a hobby I tinkered with. I may be making mistakes as I find my way, but I have no more regrets.

-- Gigi

Martha Mulls Over Mistakes

Picking up where Lisa left off....a few years ago, I worked for a center with a mission to improve end-of-life care. While I escaped behind number crunching, my coworkers had front row seats to our patients' last days.

As expected, the patients who were conscious enough to talk often ruminated over their lives.

The trips they didn't take because there was no time.
The girl they never talked to because they feared rejection.
The job they let slip by because it was too risky.

There was no lament over having suffered embarrassment, indignity, or downfall. No bemoaning brushes with poverty or pain.

There is something comforting in knowing that in a long life, at the end of days, with all the perspective and experiences a human can possibly have, the only mistakes you regret are the ones you didn't let yourself make.

So you know where I'm going with this, right?

Make 'em. Make tons of them. So what? The older, wiser you won't care.

Better a Mistake than a Regret

Mistake is such a funny term, it can encompass everything from...wearing the wrong shoes with an outfit to marrying the wrong person. Some mistakes are just blips, but some have lasting impact.

There’s this instinctive need in everyone to stop ourselves from making a mistake. And I know I try to protect my children and have them learn from my mistakes. That “I know better than you, I’ve already made that mistake, let me help you” talk never works. (Much to my dismay, although I keep trying) Everyone has to learn from their own missteps.




Sometimes the missteps take me in directions I’d never even considered despite my unswerving “worst case scenario” outlook, nobly handed down from my grandmother to my mother to me.

Have you ever been on the cusp of a decision, wondering which path to chose, wondering what is the “right” decision? Sometimes nearly crippled by indecision.

I remember finally figuring out a core truth for myself. I honestly don’t recall what the decision was about but I remember weighing the pros and cons (and yes I will do this frequently) teeter-tottering back and forth as one side got heavier in my mind. Until I was finally struck by what I really needed to do.

Now I gauge most decisions by this hard and fast question: Will I regret it if I don’t _____?

So have I made mistakes? Of course, but as much as I occasionally regret the outcome, I don’t regret the choice.

Lisa


ps. So when that mistake knocks you flat, just pick yourself up (get treatment if need be–kidding, mostly) and then move on because that’s what humans do...we evolve.

Other People’s Mistakes

L.G.C. Smith

Last week’s posts established that we are a largely functional lot able to view our mistakes philosophically and move on. Nothing screams sanity louder than the willingness to take personal responsibility for one’s mistakes. We also know we are deserving of love and grace, despite our mistakes, and we learn to forgive and do better next time.

There is one category of mistakes, however, where precious little grace operates. These are Other People’s Mistakes, and by ‘People,” I include technology, because there is always a person behind the machine (so far), and Nature, because it can be so seriously inconvenient. Other People’s Mistakes are much more infuriating than our own. Even so, most of us are shockingly capable of forgiving major transgressions committed by people we love. These are not the types of mistakes I am talking about. I am referring to the day-to-day torment inflicted by other people’s stupid lazy carelessness. Here are some I find particularly maddening.

Mistakes of Nature

Mosquitos. Gnats. No-see-ums. Poisonous snakes and spiders. Sweat. Pimples. Super-efficient metabolisms in times of plenty. Super Volcanoes. Super bugs. Ice ages. Asteroids colliding with the earth. Florida. Most of Texas. (Asteroids landing in either of those states are off the list.) Skin that sunburns. Gingko fruit and durian. Sticker burrs and foxtails.

And so much more.

Driving Mistakes

Talking on the phone (hands free or not), eating, putting on makeup, picking things up off the floor, letting a dog sit on your lap, wearing earphones and/or playing music too loudly to hear what’s going on around you (like emergency vehicles climbing up your ass because you’re in the way) and, above all, TEXTING while driving.

Not signaling when turning or changing lanes, and signaling when not turning or changing lanes. Slow drivers on the freeway anywhere but in the slow lane. Worse yet, planting your pokey butt in the fast lane and setting the cruise control at 55 MPH. (This happens a lot in Texas, which is one reason I don’t care if an asteroid takes it out.) Not looking over your shoulder when you change lanes. Never using your mirrors to see what’s going on behind you. Ignoring motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians. Stopping cold in the middle of any road with traffic behind you. (I don’t care if you’re lost or confused. Keep moving!) Stopping at the end of entrance ramps onto highways and interstates because you don’t know the difference between ‘merge’ and ‘yield.’ Failing to zipper properly (aka ‘taking turns’) when lanes collapse. Again, Texans, this means you. Your egos are not on the line here, y’all. It's just how traffic moves.

Geez, I could write a frickin’ book about other people’s idiotic and dangerous driving mistakes. Especially in Austin. I don’t understand the problem there. People are, for the most part, kinder and friendlier than just about anywhere I’ve been. They’re interesting, clever, and fun. Put them behind the wheel of a vehicle and they go from zero to TSTL in 1.8 seconds. The only thing I can figure is that it must be part of the Keep Austin Weird ethos. If anyone in Austin is listening, you need new slogans for drivers. I’m fond of “This is the Interstate, not your grandaddy’s back forty! Look!”

Mistakes Made by Government, Large Corporations, Vendors and Credit Score Keepers

You know what I’m talking about here. You push the wrong button somewhere while buying golf shoes on-line, and the next thing you know, you’re billed for a Today’s Special! Lighted Globe showing all World Premier Golf Courses at the special one-time only price of $299. You didn’t cancel in three business days because you didn’t know about it because, oh, my, you didn’t obsessively check your credit card activity online every single day. You spend the next two weeks trying to correct the problem via the phone and e-mail, and you finally think it’s been taken care of. Someone in Customer Service assures you it has been. You double-check your credit card company.

Then you get billed for it twice.

So you stop payment from your credit card company with all the correspondence and phoning that entails. Pretty soon you begin getting bills direct from the company you bought the original golf shoes from (which you had to return because they sent you 9 Narrow instead of 9 Medium, which they were out of -- GAH!). You do your best. Nothing changes. A few months later you’re getting collections calls from pushy people who don’t care about what happened because their only job is to get you to fork over the $299, plus the cost of the shoes you returned, plus restocking fees, plus late fees, plus collections service fees.

After a year of being harassed, you have your lawyer send the original company a letter, and it lands on Someone Reasonable’s desk, and everything gets cleared up. You even have letters sent to all the credit score bureaus, and you follow up and are assured all is well. There are no bad marks on your credit score.

A year later you come up for a tax audit because you didn’t pay state sales tax on some golf shoes and a globe you ordered from an out-of-state company.

Four years on, you try to refinance your house, and you can’t get a lower rate because there’s an unpaid bill for $482.19 from an Internet golf store.

These kinds of Other People’s Mistakes can tempt the sanest, most forgiving and self-aware among us to fantasize about going off the grid.

Oh, screw that. There are too many Mistakes of Nature off the grid.

There is no hope. We cannot escape Other People’s Mistakes. All we can do is rant.

Making Dessert from Disaster

Will our dear readers believe today's flubbed attempt to process our guest's post on time was was a deliberate attempt to reenact our theme of mistakes? That the PensFatales dedication to this topic goes above and beyond words? That we don't talk the talk, we talk the talk? Hmmmmm...we think...not.

Luckily our guest today, Joelle Carbonneau, is all too familiar with mistakes judging by the content of her post and the title of her new novel, SKATING AROUND THE LAW, coming out next week (woohoo! Congratulations, Joelle!). From one mistake-maven to another, hopefully she will forgive us!



Thanks for much for the Pens Fatales for inviting me to blog today. It is totally appropriate that I am blogging on Mistakes Week, because – yes – I’m prone to making them. I have the tendency to trip over my own feet when wearing high heels, save documents in places on my computer that guys at MIT would never be able to find and occasionally, I have been known to bake oatmeal cookies with no flour.

Funny about the oatmeal cookie thing. On a good day, I’m a decent cook. However, this time the cookies lost all shape and melted all over the cookie sheet into a big mess. After one look, my inclination was to pitch the whole mess into the garbage can and start over. Only, I am a touch crazy and I took a taste. Yum. I then shoveled the crumbly mess into a bowl and used it to top ice cream. Double yum.

Baking is not the only area in which I’ve found a mistake can turn into an unlikely opportunity. A few years ago, I set aside a manuscript I’d been editing and started writing a totally different kind of book for kicks. It was the most fun I’d ever had writing. Any goofy or strange idea that popped into my head went onto the page. And to top it off, I was writing in a genre I hadn’t studied much.

Everyone always says you should study the genre before you start writing. I used to believe that. Scratch that. I still do. Only, I made a mistake. I didn’t really know the subgenre I was writing in when I started. Heck, I don’t think I’d ever heard the term for the subgenre. Belonging to RWA, I knew all the romance subgenres, but I wasn’t writing a romance. (To tell the truth, I was bad at writing romances….and I tried. Another mistake, but one I learned from.) So instead of knowing what I was writing and making sure that I created a story that fit the expectations of the editors and readers of the genre, I just wrote.

Once I was done writing, I realized I had no idea what I had written. Yes, Skating Around The Law was a mystery, but what kind of mystery? Turns out I wrote a book that follows the cozy mystery guidelines but isn’t really a cozy. Well crap. I’d made a HUGE mistake. Everyone knows that it is easier to get a book published if it falls squarely in one genre. Yes, people blend genres all the time, but editors have a harder time selling those books to their editorial board because they are riskier. Double crap.

And yet, like the flattened oatmeal cookies, I couldn’t bring myself to throw that manuscript into the trash. It didn’t taste so good on ice cream, but I loved it. Turns out my agent and editor did, too. The one thing I’ve learned from the experience is that sometimes mistakes are more than good lessons. Sometimes they are opportunities. You just have to take a step back from the mistake and decide which one it is. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’ll find your mistake is both. I bet if you think about it, you have a few tasty mistakes out there of your own that I’d love to hear about.

A Single Red Flower

--Adrienne Miller

It’s my birthday. 

If you are reading this on Thursday, chances are, right now I am hurtling down I-5, through California’s central valley. The stereo is probably blasting The Killers - Live from Royal Albert Hall. Two little boys are strapped tight into their car seats and my husband is dozing off in the passenger seat, cause we’re headed to Disneyland! 

It’s not a biggie birthday. No zeros or fives involved. No rush to complete the list of things I said I would do before I got to it. There are no commemorative t-shirts when you turn thirty-four. But I’m still going to Disneyland. 

This is my favorite picture from Disneyland. A single red flower in a sea of pale purple. I love it.

I spotted this little guy as we were walking past the main gate area on our last trip. He caught my eye, and I snapped off about two dozen photos before I got this one--photography is not a natural talent of mine. 

Did the gardener make a mistake? Was it a simple case of grabbing the wrong bloom at 3am? Or, did she put it there hoping someone like me would find it, a little reminder that, even in an ocean of thousands, it is still possible to stand out? Does it even matter?

No, not really. Because like most mistakes, it’s not about the action itself; it’s the perspective we choose afterwards that matters.

It's a Do-Over

--by Juliet

I like to think of mistakes quite literally as miss-takes, things gone awry. It implies the possibility of a do-over, something to be learned from, rather than regretted.

I’ve made a whole lot of mistakes, but I have very few regrets. In part, this is because I’m superstitious: I love the current version of my life so much that I fear what it might look like if I’d done even one thing differently.

Like the flapping of a butterfly’s wings triggering a tsunami, or whatever that theory actually says…What would my life be like if I’d gotten up the nerve to teach in Malawi? If I’d stayed in Spain with my Chilean lover? If I hadn’t married my now ex-husband…? These are turning points that make me look back and wonder, from time to time, what an alternate life would have been like. In my best moments I think it would have been a similarly wonderful life, just a different version. In my darkest moments, I feel like I made it this far only by the skin of my teeth....That’s when I thank my lucky stars that things turned out as they did, mistakes and all.

One of the hardest things for me as a parent was (and continues to be) letting my son make his own mistakes. We want our loved ones to learn from our experiences--and certainly our mistakes-- but everyone has to make their own errors to really learn from them, deep down.

I love watching a small child trying to master a new skill. They might get frustrated, even cry, but in general they’ll circle back around, trying again and again, and repeating mistakes until they finally get it right. Infants trying to walk --responding to the unique human imperative to pull themselves up and walk on their hind feet-- won’t stop just because they screw up the first hundred times. You might hold their pudgy little hands in yours, but they’re the ones who have to do the hard work and fall on their butts repeatedly, striving for bipedal balance. Eventually they’ll get it on their own – and when they do, their confidence soars, and they beam with pride and wonder.

Our mistakes teach us things. And not just mechanical things like walking, or reading, or riding a bike, but big things. Really big things.

It is, at least in part, by making stupid, thoughtless, even cruel mistakes that we learn compassion for others. Those cringe-worthy mistakes we’ve all committed can help us understand when we witness another person acting their meanest, lowest self. Our mistakes teach us how to ask forgiveness, and to forgive others. How to break hearts, and survive a broken heart.

In fiction, of course, mistakes, shame, regrets, and the possibility of redemption… these are all great grist for the writing mill. And as they say, all writing is, to some extent, autobiography: I know a lot of authors who write about something they’d wish they’d done differently in life. They allow their characters to do it again, take another crack at it, change things, and have different results. It’s a cathartic, fictional, do-over.

A new take on that old miss-take.

This picture has nothing to do with this essay, but it's my niece Erendira Ibarra with her first magazine cover. Cool, huh? I'm very proud ;-)

Rachael's Mistake

Justin was my mistake.

Mistakes happen, don't they? No malice aforethought, no pre-planning, you just end up screwing something up and you never planned to.

I was half in love with Justin for years. Blond and tall, with a face like an angel (I don't that say that lightly -- he actually DID have an angelic face, if an angel can have dreamy eyes and a wicked, knowing smile). But we were just friends for a long time. I helped him with girl trouble, and he supplied me with cigarettes as we lay on our backs in his country driveway, watching the stars.

Years later, he came to me. As a friend. We spent an afternoon together, just talking, and by the evening, we were in love. Head over heels -- it was big.

The problem was that I wasn't free. The timing was all wrong. I was in the middle of trying to fix a relationship that ended up in freefall, as it should have, but I didn't know that then. I only knew that Justin fit into small, discrete pockets of my life, when I could hide him in my treehouse in the Oakland hills. But oh, I loved him hard. Too hard.

I told him we couldn't be together. That it was the wrong time. I broke his heart, and mine, too. I did it over the phone, mistake number one. Mistake number two, I stopped answering his phone calls.

It was a supremely assholic move. I loved him -- why couldn't I just talk to him? Try to explain more why we couldn't be together? I was scared that I was doing the wrong thing. I was also scared I was doing the right thing.

I wrapped myself in the huge red flannel shirt I'd borrowed from him, the one with the worn spot at the shoulder, where he would absent-mindedly rub his chin when he was thinking, and I sat on my porch, smoking, listening to the phone ring.

Pearl Buck said, "Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied." That was my moment. I let it pass, unremedied.

Finally, after many phone calls that I let go to voice mail, Justin left a message saying he'd seen me in a dream, and he'd let me go. I cried and cried, knowing I'd done it all the wrong way. I've gone on to dream of him many times over the years, and every time it finally feels real -- I tell him how many times I've dreamed of this moment -- I'm ecstatic to see him -- I grab him and apologize for the way I hurt him and he smiles at me with those sweet, sweet eyes, and everything in the world is right.

Then I wake and realize it didn't happen. My mistake sits there, grimacing at me in the dark, and I'm unable to do anything about it. Sometimes I fantasize about posting his last name online in an entry like this, because I can't find him -- maybe he'd find himself and contact me. But why? So I can apologize for making one of the biggest mistakes of my life? For letting a love that was more lovely than most others I've known go because I couldn't make the timing work? And doing it badly, furthermore? Or maybe his wife would end up Googling him and ask jealous questions, and I'd end up feeling even more stupid.

Or maybe he'd never know, and never care. Maybe he never thinks of me at all. That would be, basically, what I deserve. Justin and I only had perhaps six weeks together, all told, over several years. And it's not like I want to be with him. I love where I am, and I love who I married. Our love is the biggest I've known.

But I regret the mistake I made by hurting someone I loved in an unnecessarily cruel way. I should have answered his calls. I know I should have. (I even wrote about HERE six years ago, and mailed a letter to his mother's address, with the hope it would get to him, but I don't know if it ever reached him. Oh, I hope it did.)

I gave the shirt to Goodwill years ago in a fit of closet-cleaning. I purged other things, too, love letters from other people that I knew I'd never want to read, pictures of times I didn't care to remember. But I made a mistake in the way I broke up with Justin, and I made a mistake by getting rid of that flannel shirt. Damn it.

Mistake? Nah, Just Self-Expression

by Sophie

MISTAKES

I'm hardly a perfectionist. I'm happy to take shortcuts, and the phrase "good enough is good enough" could have been coined by me.

Early on I came to understand that this personality quirk was beyond my control, something I was born with. How else to explain my mother's willingness to rip out a seam - several times if necessary - to get a fabric print repeat to line up right...when I viewed my own sewing projects as approximations, good-natured efforts whose flaws were not only to be expected, but inevitable?

Sewing became a fertile place to work out the meaning of mistakes - long before I knew that's what I was doing. Were they evidence of a flawed character, a moral deficit? This was back in the days when our main goal when sewing was to produce garments that could pass for store-bought, a notion that was hard to shed decades later when the publisher I was working for produced books on crafts that were meant to look unapologetically, intentionally home-made. In 1978 - a year when, at age fifteen, I sewed much of my wardrobe - each mistake had to be reviewed with a critical eye: could that skewed patch pocket, that bowed line of topstitching, that lopsided dart go unnoticed, or would I have to re-do it to avoid the dreaded home-sewn look? I knew what my mother would say: rip, re-do. Her own projects from that era - I remember a peasant blouse trimmed with navy jacobean embroidery, as well as innumerable plaid shirts with perfectly aligned repeat matches - were utterly above reproach.

I think one of the things that appealed to me about quilting, when I took it up seriously over a decade ago, was that there was room for both ends of the spectrum. Certainly there were and are quilters for whom the perfect stitch is an endless quest.

But while editing copy for quilt books for C&T, the publisher for whom I worked, I found out something marvelous: early American quilters viewed a pursuit of perfection as an offense to God. To ensure that their quilts would not be guilty of such an affront, it was common to pierce one's finger and bleed on an inside seam. That drop of blood was like a humility offering; by allowing the stain in the finished quilt one was admitting one was imperfect.

I find that notion beautiful. While I never bled on my quilts (despite stabbing myself so many times I had a permanent callus on several of my fingers) I did enjoy finding the errors and then - deliberately and almost rebelliously - letting them stay.

I don't quilt any more, because writing takes up all my free time. But I do love all the quilts I kept, and I have them hung throughout the house. I know where the mistakes are. I sort of love them.

Have you heard of the Gee's Bend Quilts? If not, take a look - they are unlike anything you have ever seen. They literally changed not just my understanding of quilting but of home-making and of life in its entirety. These poor Alabama women undertook to make functional, practical quilts to keep themselves and their loved one's warm at night - but they did so with wild, unfettered abandon, putting aside any notion of what a patch should be, or a block, or a quilting template or a color palette. Nothing was considered prescribed. None of them judged each other's work unworthy. From the site: "The women consider the process of "piecing" the quilt "top" to be highly personal."

I was blessed with an opportunity to see these quilts when the exhibit came to San Francisco. I'll never forget seeing them hung in the museum. I read stories of grief - a woman who made her dead husband's work jeans and coveralls into a quilt that she slept under to feel as though he was close - and joy, and I loved the women's words which the curator of the show had wisely made available alongside their work. There was no talk of "mistakes."

Some day, I'll return to quilting. I'm not sure what I'll make first. But I hope I can bring a fraction of the passion to my work that the Gee's Bend women possess. And I hope that I can take up my needle again without letting the thought of mistakes slow me down.