The Benefits of Mistakes

Intrusive thoughts nag at every one of us. Why did I have to go through that? Is any of this fair? Why me? I should have been more careful sooner. We make mistakes constantly, and almost all of us refuse to admit it. But a mistake is often success wearing a disguise. Yes, mistakes are built to hurt, to make us second-guess ourselves, to leave us afraid to take another step. That fear is the signal that we have to keep going. I would rather go down fighting something than go down any other way.

I won't pretend we stop replaying our mistakes, because they tend to stick around and haunt us for a long stretch. What I want is for us to think about them in a realistic way. My therapist puts it simply: the brain has no delete button. Mistakes happen. None of us owns a time machine. The only move left is to make up for the bad choices we made.

People living with a mental health condition will, over time, usually do something that leaves a real mark, whether that is gambling, lying, or shoplifting. Nobody fully understands the feeling of doing something again and again, compulsively, while at the same time not wanting to hurt yourself or the people around you. Mistakes repeat, and sometimes a person genuinely does not know how to avoid making the same one for the hundredth time.

So how do mistakes actually help us? What if the things we punish ourselves for are the stepping stones that let us walk back into the world in a better frame of mind? Everyone has heard that easy is not the same as good. When something is hard, it pushes you out into unfamiliar territory, and that is exactly what a mistake does.

My own mistakes arrived when I was not myself at all, when my condition had taken over and talked my rational brain into believing that what it watched me do every day was wrong but somehow harmless. That was the first error. I failed to see that the people in my life mattered too, not only me and my inflated wish to be more than I was, a wish my mania had manufactured. I am not saying we cannot grow into something bigger than we are now. I am saying that a mental health condition can make us self-absorbed without our knowing it, a wall we often have no idea we are standing behind.

Mistakes force us to sit back, watch our own actions, name what went wrong, and figure out what has to change. Then comes a choice: keep heading down the same path or turn toward something unknown. Mental illness builds a comfort zone around us. Inside it, a mistake can feel tiny even while our minds blow it up to enormous size. We soothe ourselves into believing everything is fine when it is not.

What even counts as a mistake? A mistake is a mistake because you did something wrong. In theory it should appear once and teach you never to repeat it. Mental illness, though, leaves the door open for mistakes to fire off like a semi-automatic weapon. You keep pulling the trigger without ever reloading your judgment about what you should be doing instead. The more mistakes you fire, the harder life gets. I hope you can spot the point where an intervention is needed, because once the errors start going off like fireworks, there is only a narrow window to turn things around.

When you are struggling with a mental health condition, the mistakes are often enormous. So enormous that people simply give up on living. We make the kind of life mistakes that pull people away from us and strip opportunities out of our hands. That is its own trauma. So what good can possibly come from traumatic experiences? Everyone comes out of a hard stretch a better person, even when they can't see it themselves. In one of my groups, I was listing off my faults, complaining about how much I was struggling, when two members put their hands up and said, 'I don't think you realize what you've actually accomplished.'

Maybe the more we obsess over our failures, the more we miss the parts of us that are improving, and the more we wound the self that needs protecting. To get through the truly awful mistakes, we have to be willing to feel the sharpest sting of embarrassment and rejection a person can feel. We have to take a few beatings before we notice any improvement in our lives or in how we see ourselves. That is hard, and I understand that plenty of people don't have the energy or the will to sit through that much pain and shame. The thing standing between us and dealing with our mistakes is usually us.

My mistake was lying, and lying on Facebook. Having friends, family, and a couple of boys I had crushes on figure out that what I posted and who I claimed to be was all fabricated: that is a mistake I know will never leave me. For years I was fully aware of what I was doing. The things I did online, at school, and with friends were hurting me, but they felt good at the time and I couldn't see a reason to stop. One thing I knew but never really let myself recognize: once you understand that you are doing something wrong, something usually goes wrong.

- Susan Page