A Brand of Admission

You know what sucks? Being wrong. Doing a bad. Making a mistake. It doesn’t matter what the scope of your mistake is. It always, ever, sucks. Whether it’s being wrong about some little factual thing in a discussion of varying relevance. Or acting out of order with your close ones, leaving hurt feelings and sullen silence in your wake. Or even if you’ve gone so far as to bring down a whole air plane filled with people, regardless if it’s filled with 176 or 298 souls.

And admitting it, that you done fucked up, is even worse.

Why is that though? Why is it so much more fucking terrible to admit your mistakes than it is to actually make them? Everyone fucks up every once in a while. We’ve all done it. Maybe not pushed a button or trigger and ended hundreds of peoples’ lives in a flash of ignited jet fuel. That’s a sin exclusive to just a few sorry sods out there. But just about regardless of the severity of our fumble, that otherwise seems to be such a universal unifier, it is so very very very difficult to cop to it. In many cases, our aversion to own our mistakes takes on such stupendous dimensions that it, for some gods awful reason, seems like a better idea to keep digging the hole we’re in rather than try to climb out of it.

Just a casual look into the Orange Wellspring of Stupidity that used to be known as the White House easily illustrates the point, if although in mind-boggling extremes. How a man, by the loosest definition of the word possible, can keep making mistake after mistake without ever acknowledging a single one of them, and yet retain his position of solidifying power and withering prestige.

A “man” that seems, to his final death rattle, refuse that he ever, ever ever ever, made a single itty bitty mistake. A “man” for whom failure seems to be more abhorrent than fashioning himself into a cult symbol for the most deranged and dangerous people in America. A “man” that just won’t. Stop. Digging.

I wonder why that is. Who or what ever instilled in us the idea that our mistakes define us to such a dire extent that they will completely condemn our character, our identity, if faced. Have churches, schools, parents, political paradigms, profit oriented economical structures, performance anxiety, and philosophers really managed to beat into us so thoroughly that we’re only ever as good as our worst mistake. That success somehow ever comes in the miraculous absence of failure. Despite the very measurable fact that the greatest heroes and role models of any age often stand on a veritable carnage of failures and fumbles to reach their historic heights.

For example, from off the top of my head; George Washington, revered by millions as a revolutionary hero and founding father, who failed in nearly every battle he brought his colonial forces into, and in so winning an unwinnable war. Some accounts of the man going so far as to paint him as wearing his many mistakes and failures on his sleeves, as if they were his real accomplishments. His survivals.

So, why oh why, are we so afraid of admitting failure? Even when the greatest among us are demonstrably the ones that stand unbowed among their shattered chances, as opposed to the countless unsung lessers that are lied to have never broken a vase of opportunity in their lives?

I don’t know. I don’t get it. I, like anyone, also feel that pathetic pang of shame and anguish whensoever I’m called to be held accountable. But I don’t get it either. I don’t understand where it comes from. There’s not a single shred of evidence, in either practise or story sung, where accountability has borne worse consequences than the action itself.

We need to stop. We need to stop making excuses. Stop trying to sweep shattered vases, shot down air planes, or fish choking on plastic and dying coral reefs under the rug. We need to stop leaving our failures in darkness, left to fester and swell unattended and ignored. Even if unbridled shame is the hallmark of the human race, we need to stop. Because just as heroes are forged from openly brandished mistakes, monsters grow from the faults we keep hidden.

Because I think most of us would rather be the former than the latter.

/Sebastian Lindberg 13/1-2020