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Wednesday, April 28, 2010

The Power To Be Wrong


Can I tell you just how wrong I am, or have been, for most of my life? Will that make everyone that has been a part of my life feel better if I make this admission? Perhaps. The question is, can they themselves do the same? Or is that wrong of me to ask?


My entire life, seemingly since I emerged from the womb, I have been deemed to be a ‘chosen one’. Opportunities granted to me by the mere happenstance of my birth. I’ve been declared by some to have been born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Are these things true? I suppose by the standards of some, sure. I am no trust-fund baby, nor was I able to take off and backpack across Europe on my parents’ dime when I was younger. However, I have been comfortable for most of my life. However, as some of you may know, having the term ‘chosen one’ applied to oneself can lead to a serious case of high expectations and low aspirations. I’ve found this to be true in varying degrees and cycles throughout my life. And frequently, this moniker also gives one some heady sentiments about being wrong.


Being wrong is failure. Or so I used to believe.


Sharing the fear of many women, and recoiling at the thought of behaving exactly like my mother, I decided about a decade ago that I should start looking at my personality, and admitting when I was wrong (my mother is completely lacking in the "I made a mistake department", but she is of course allowed to be who she is as much as I am). This proved to be much easier said than done. It didn’t help that a few years after this decision was made, I went through a horribly traumatic divorce and decided that the only way I could face my reality was to seriously self-medicate into a state of complete desolation and simulated death of the life I had known up until that point. I entered a state of reality where my every action was completely wrong to my very core, or so it seemed at the time. If I was living in this state perpetually, how could I admit I was wrong all of the time without feeling like a piece of shit every second of every day? Do you know what that can lead to? Unadulterated fear and loathing. Which I did not need any more of at that time. My boyfriend during this phase of my life loved to tell me that I could never admit fault, and that in not being able to admit fault, or denying that I wasn't wrong about whatever we may have been discussing at the time, that I was always wrong by default. How's that for circular argument? I assured him that I just liked to keep the lines of debate open, but he wasn't buying it. Truthfully, I think he was projecting his own insecurity with being wrong onto me, but hey, I could be wrong about that too.


Did I mention that as time has gone on, it has gotten easier, this absolving of guilt and shame in being wrong, and that the freedom I find in being wrong, or at least admitting that I could be, has changed my life completely?


I have discovered that being wrong isn’t failure at all. Fear is failure. So if I am a chosen one, I choose to have no fear of anything any longer. Especially of labels and demands made on me by anyone or anything, including my own Ego.

2 comments:

  1. i like the link you make that losing your fear of being wrong means the power to be wrong. i must confess, i would like to know how this has changed your life completely?:)

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  2. Wrong by default and damn proud of it. Very well done!

    ReplyDelete