Keep the Faith

Most of what I write about are my mistakes. Now I’m going to try to master the process of the inevitable. I make so many mistakes. But through the eyes of experience, I see that recovery from one’s mistakes is as fraught a process as the mistakes themselves. Often when I fuck up, my reaction is apology or erasure, not a thoughtful consideration of the steppingstones to hell. And that’s what many of my mistakes are. Little bits of hell that have eternal life in my memory. I keep a list of them on my phone. Partly because they’re stories to remember, and partly because they represent my greatest weaknesses. Just last week I was looking for an old photo and I remembered something I did in the 1980s that was a horrible mistake—the dress I wore to Tina’s wedding. I added it to the list.

It’s very hard to correct a mistake I made forty years ago, but I’m not letting go of it because what I got tangled up in was the creative process and the ego of my dressmaker. She made the dress she wanted to make. It was not the dress the bride wanted me to wear. But it was a pretty cool dress. Mea culpa. The revelation that is hitting me now is how we become so attached to the things we make that we hang onto them at all costs, even when they’re a huge mistake. I was the maid of honor. I was told to wear a cornflower blue dress. The dress I wore was teal because the dressmaker chose the fabric. The dress was half made by the time I went for a fitting.

It may not sound like much to you, but when I showed up for the wedding in that dress, the bride wanted to stab me. Blood red would have better suited her mood than teal. She hired a professional photographer for the wedding and had me cut out of the photos. Mea culpa. Mea culpa.

I regret all the mistakes on my list, and that dress is not the worst one. But they do fortify my faith in myself. Here I am a thousand stupid mistakes after that wedding and I am finally getting good at correcting myself. Maybe because I’ve had so much practice. The corrections don’t always happen as fast as I’d like them too. But this is the stuff life is made of—mistakes and corrections. We all make mistakes. Individually and collectively. I forgive myself. I forgive all of you. Now I need to move on to the process of fixing what went wrong. In the 1980s, I hired a shrink. In 2025, I hired a book coach. The psychoanalysis is an oddly similar process.

Sometimes the things I think are funny are not funny to other people. Sometimes the things I think are smart are half-baked, occasionally idiotic. Sometimes I go dark, and the things that come out of me are a downer. I own this. The older I get the easier it is to see. I have a list on my phone to remind me. It’s so much easier to see how I fucked up Tina’s wedding forty years ago than it is to see how I fucked up a novel two years ago. Thus the book coach. And I’m happy to report it’s working. But it takes so much time. Perspective requires distance. Time is distance. It feels slow and I am impatient. That’s my weakness. It’s more exciting to leapfrog the steppingstones and fly by the seat of my pants. Cornflower, teal—what’s the difference? There is an ocean of difference. In the case of my book, I had to change my writing goal to get a grip. I thought the goal was to publish. Now I know the goal is mastery. I need to be better. But I have faith.

I have faith that I will master writing. I’m just not there yet. It’s solitary. There is no applause. The experiences my ego feeds on are more nuanced. To understand the process of mastery I took a class in literary criticism. Then I found a book coach whose criticism I respect. She has given me the most thoughtful, detailed, actionable criticism I have ever received. After the first crushing blows I stopped writing for a couple weeks and wallowed. Then I went back to her plan for rewriting my book and began the task. It’s been months and I’m not done yet. And now, of course, I want to rewrite everything I’ve ever written. My sense of self is refined. I won’t be satisfied until I hit the next level of mastery. Shortly after that, I expect to be feeling like a failure again. So, really what I’m doing is turbo charging my hamster wheel.

This is how I keep the faith with myself, with you. I run naked on the internet because I want to know I’ve taken the risk and survived; made the mistake and evolved the correction. Healed and hurt. Hurt and healed. This is how I build my strength. Mostly, I’m made of scar tissue. I push myself to the outer limits and wait to see what happens. 

Mastery is not perfection. It’s the speed of correction. We all make mistakes. That’s how we learn. Individually and collectively we shit the bed. Mastery of ourselves, our thoughts and behavior accelerates the process of correcting our mistakes. I’m trying to improve myself one step at a time. We all know this, but I’m going to say it anyway: The process is the destination. I want to be better at what I do. Fear and disappointment are out there waiting for me. I know it. But mastery is out there, too. As long as I keep the faith.