April 19, 2012 Al Gore inventing the Internet esprit pants in the 1980s fail better guilt and shame John Waters psychobabble seventh grade summer camp the Interwebs 0

Not to be too cryptic here, but my kvetch for the day is: don’t surrender your competency. That feels like a whine in the wilderness. Simply put, if you start deciding that you can’t do something, or figure something out, that it’s too hard…I promise you: it starts a chain of thought that only takes you further down the path of incompetency. Eventually, everything is too hard and nothing works.
I’m not saying that I’m perfect at everything, or even, necessarily, at anything–except perhaps whining–but I at least try. Some things I figure out, other things…that’s why Al Gore invented the Interwebs.
I’m more talking about people who have just decided that they simply cannot do something, anything. They can’t do it, and so it’s no longer their problem: they absolve themselves. (No psychobabble here. I promise.)
While I’m all about forgiving yourself for stuff that happened to you in your life that you could not control, yet still continues to haunt you (your childhood, for example, or summer camp, or those Esprit white pants with neon dribbles of paint I wore in seventh grade…)…if you always let yourself off the hook, if it’s never your fault…how do you ever improve things? If all the crap relationships were never your fault…how do you go about creating a successful one? If the career mishaps were never your fault…how do you start a successful career?
Listen, I’m not in love with guilt and shame. (Though, to paraphrase John Waters: it does make the sex great!)  I find it very boring to be around people constantly guilty, constantly beating themselves up. On the other hand, it even more tedious to be around people who constantly make the same damn mistakes over and over, because oh, it’s not their mistake, and so they never figure anything out, they never learn and suddenly here we are, having the same conversation, for example, about men, that we’ve had since the 1990s. Sweet fancy Moses!
So, while I’m not in love with guilt and shame, I do adore people who can own up to their mistakes, and try to understand what happened and why and maybe not make the same mistake again. And, last time I checked: that’s kinda the whole point of life, right? Fail better till you get it right. Fake it till you make it. (Insert your own cliche here.)
And when you’re ready to have some help in learning from your own wonderful mistakes, email me @carlotazee@gmail.com!

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