This post is part of Calliope’s summer camp.
Day 4: What has most surprised you about being an adult? What have you learned about yourself through blogging?
My eye is twitching like crazy right now. I hate typing on a netbook.
The thing that has surprised me the most about being an adult is my seemingly endless capacity to make mistakes. I’ve read today’s post for several of the other campers and I agree that I thought adulthood meant eating what I want to eat, wearing what I want to wear, living where I want to live. You know, capital F freedom. But at the core of it all, I thought I was right. I thought I was always right. I thought that what I wanted to eat, wear or where to live were easy questions with right answers and that I would move unerringly into adulthood.
I was wrong.
I think life is ultimately about change and changing circumstances mean that choices are hard and consequences may be even harder. And it is easy, nay expected, to make mistakes. I am not right, and probably rarely am.
But that’s okay, you know? I’m rarely right and neither are you. Its not the end of the world. Most mistakes don’t ruin us unless we let them. I haven’t blogged long enough, consistently enough to be able to say blogging has taught me X, but I think this is what I want from blogging. Putting it ‘out there’, airing my mistakes may be a sort of personal forgiveness. A way to say to myself, “Self, you are not alone as you stumble.”
And if you feel alone, just know that I am stumbling here in the dark right beside you.
Great post! This is something that I struggle with, too. I always feel like an idiot when I make a mistake, and then I feel bad about it as well. Sort of a double whammy.
I am trying to learn that it is OK to make mistakes. Everyone does, and it is part of life. That can sometimes be a hard lesson to learn.