We all make mistakes. This is what separates us as humans from machines. Yesterday I was posting on Facebook about loving my reliable, fairly new, Keurig to make coffee in the morning. Today, I forgot to put my coffee cup under the basket before hitting the start button and you can probably guess what happened. My normal response before therapy would have been rage. To call myself stupid. Blame my aging brain, or even god for his sick sense of humor. But today, I quietly picked up my cup and the Keurig machine and started to wipe up the “hot” mess of undrinklable coffee liquid off the counter. Dare I say that I was proud of myself.
Mistakes are part of life and when we start to see them as just a normal thing and not life altering, they are easier to live with even if they are messy and difficult to clean up.
I remember quite vividly when I was learning to drive, the thought “if you make a mistake, it’s okay as long as nobody dies.”
So how did I get here, cool and collective about the mess I made in the kitchen? This would’ve been a death sentence or at the very least met with verbal abuse for my “stupidity” from my mother was obsessed with cleanliness and perfection?
What changed was not my ability to avoid mistakes. What changed was my relationship with them.
Somewhere along the way, through therapy, healing, and a lot of uncomfortable self-reflection, I began to understand that perfectionism is often rooted in fear. Fear of criticism. Fear of rejection. Fear of being seen as flawed or unworthy. When you grow up in an environment where mistakes are treated like catastrophes, your nervous system learns to respond to spilled coffee as if it were an actual emergency.
As children, we absorb the emotional rules of our households. Some children learn that accidents are no big deal. Others learn that one wrong move can bring shame, anger, silence, or punishment. Those lessons do not magically disappear when we become adults. They follow us into our kitchens, our relationships, our workplaces, and even our thoughts about ourselves.
For years, I believed mistakes meant that I failed, I was a disappointment to my parents, and I was unworthy of love.
Therapy helped me separate mistakes from identity.
Now, when something goes wrong, I try to pause before attacking myself. I remind myself that human beings are imperfect by design. We forget things. We lose our keys. We send texts to the wrong person. We burn dinner. We say things we wish we could take back. We trust the wrong people. None of this makes us unlovable. It makes us human.
So today, I looked at the mess on my beautiful grey granite countertops, picked up a new sponge, and started to clean up the undrinkable coffee and moved on with my morning. No rage. No insults directed at myself. No emotional spiral over a simple mistake.
Just a woman, a messy counter, and a nervous system finally learning that spilled coffee is not the end of the world.
Written by Candace Schoner, author of Recipe for a Happier Life: Apron Optional