We are not the Mistakes we make

I point out and correct other people’s mistakes on a daily basis. It’s what I do. I’m an editor and this is how I earn a living. And I like it! I thrive on the painstaking process of deleting errors – both major and minor and even those that only a trained editor would ever notice – one-by-one, as if there is a perfect piece of writing underneath all the rubble and I am helping the author to salvage their flawless creation.

But becoming an editor was never the plan. It’s kind of like dreaming of becoming a pilot but ending up an aeronautical engineer – both are important jobs but the former is…well, it’s so much more romantic.

Since the first sentence of The Magic Faraway Tree was read to me for the first time (sorry Mom! I know there were many!), I’ve wanted to be an author. But wanting to become an author is a bit like wanting to become a rock star or a Nobel Prize winner – the end goal is a little abstract. 

So abstract, in fact, that I get more than a little irritated every time some new acquaintance or long lost family friend puts me on the spot by asking: “Oh, an author, hey? What kind of books do you want to write?” Without fail, my inadequate and spluttering response is: “Uh, well, you know, fiction”…  And then I slink away in shame like an “outside” dog who has just been reminded that he’s not allowed inside. 

What I really want to say when people ask me that is: “well, genius, I want to write the kind of books that come on sheets of paper between two covers?!” But, of course, I never do. I turn my artistic ire on myself instead, which, I suppose, is only fair.

You see, what the poor small-talk-attempting sap with the offending question could never possibly know is that, in stringing those letters and a question mark together, he has hit a nerve. THE nerve, in fact. He (or she) has sparked a most dreaded (and recurring) chain of thought in my life. What I really hear is: “Your dreams are ridiculous and you are ambitious beyond your own ability. I dare you to prove me wrong by having some witty comeback”.

While I waffle away my obscure reply about fiction and “not Grisham” and postmodern something-or-other – said acquaintance looking annoyingly interested –what’s really happening in my head goes something like this…

 “Oh no, I’m being exposed again a real writer would know what to say I have no hope of ever being an author I have no original ideas everything I come up with is shit but am I really trying maybe if I tried but everything I write is shit this is a silly dream I should really stop telling people this how embarrassing…”

So, at the very least, I can proudly term myself an artist if only in reference to my neurosis of choice. Like all artists and many women (lucky me! I’m both!) I am profoundly insecure. But who wouldn’t be insecure if their objective was uncompromising perfection? Some days I wake up and think: “I don’t just want to write any novel, I want to write the greatest literary work of our time – an answer to postmodernism (or something)!”

This is not because I’m arrogant but because I am a perfectionist. A great myth about perfectionists is that they are highly productive. Perfectionist’s lives are often a series of half- or almost-dones. Ambitious projects that aspire to such loftiness that the perfectionist often gives up mid-way through because they come to realise (erroneously or not) that they have set themselves an impossible task. Deflated, they amble off, feeling useless and unfulfilled until the next light bulb idea comes along. The concept is that, in my case for example, the only novel worth writing would be this hypothetical Booker of Bookers I have sitting on a pedestal in my unconscious. If I can’t produce this, I am a failure.

Yip, we perfectionists like to set impossibly high standards for ourselves. It’s not enough to be a musician; I have to be Bob Dylan. It’s not enough to be a writer; I have to be Salman Rushdie. It’s not enough to be a chef; I have to be Gordon Ramsay. We accept far less from others than from ourselves not because we feel somehow superior to the rest of the world but because, somewhere deep inside of us, we are overwhelmingly driven to prove that we are worthy. “Other people”, since they are already worthy, need not try so hard since they have nothing to prove!

It is this quality that makes me a good editor and a substantially-less-than prolific writer. My fear of failure is often so paralyzing that I am unable to write. Being able to pick out mistakes in existing pieces of writing is the perfect outlet for my need to make everything I touch “perfect”.

So, this is the epiphany that I had this morning – oddly, just after I had secured a major editing deal. It is much easier to spot and correct the mistakes of others than to avoid ever making any of your own. I realised that there are so many people out there who are, like me, so terrified of failure that they can’t even try. And I think the solution lies in redefining your concept of what constitutes failure. In fact, I think we should take it one step further and rethink the ways in which we decide how much people are worth.

There is so much power in realising that the worth of a human being is not constituted in what they have done or even (as the cheesy old adage would have it) who they are. Each of us is valuable simply because WE ARE – we exist and are therefore valuable. The value of a living creature is innate and unchangeable. You can never gain or lose any of that innate worth. Even when you mess up morally – you lie, steal or even kill – that does not make you a bad (i.e. worthless) human being, it makes you a human being who did something bad. And it is so important to remind ourselves that there is a difference.

When you truly understand that your worth is intrinsic and untouchable, you stop allowing your need to protect or improve it control every aspect of your life – every decision that you make. This is when you can just be. Just do. And when you are this comfortable in your own value as a living organism, you do not need any moral (or other) imperative not to hurt yourself or others – you feel no need to mess with your or anyone else’s sense of self-worth.

On a good day, like today, I get it and can practice what I preach. I can write something simply because getting the words out enriches my life and because reading those words just may have a positive impact on someone else’s life. That’s all.

This is why the words in Baz Luhrmann’s song really speak to my soul: “Remember compliments you receive, forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this tell me how.”