Dear Eric:

You asked me earlier: “Do u have a more frontal tips anita?”, and I asked you what you meant by it. You explained today: “I mean like a more direct tips from ur personal opinion rather than general opinion as a neutral“. Okay, in this post, I will share my personal experience with you.

You shared today about your latest mistake (“I did a mistake“) which appears, in your mind, like a catastrophe, a disaster (“I just can’t believe I did that mistake, I really want to hit the wall again… I hate it…I feel like screaming…ended up ruining myself… it feels like a disaster“).

The circumstances of the mistake: a young woman on social media was selling homemade mooncake advertised as “homemade mooncake“. The mistake: you asked her: “is the cake homemade?”

What happened in real-life, objectively speaking: nothing much, a small, short exchange on social media, no aggression, no threats of violence. And yet, subjectively, all hell breaks loose inside your brain, as if the world was destroyed and you are the cause of massive destruction.

“How can I not deserve to hit the wall when I did that mistake..?“- by realizing that you did not destroy the world. Nothing really happened, in real-life.

Like you, I used to feel very, very… very bad about making mistakes, including the tiniest mistakes. I still have a residue of that bad feeling. Only yesterday I found out that I made a mistake: instead of placing a certain (expensive) tool inside the car, I placed it on top of the car, and while forgetting about it and driving away… the tool fell off the car and is lost. When I found out that it happened, my face felt very hot and my heart was beating fast. I then reminded to myself: I am human. It is human to make mistakes. In the future, I need to not place anything on top of the car, and instead, put the tool away where it belongs. Once I made this mental note (regarding what I should and shouldn’t do in the future so to not repeat this mistake) made me feel better: my face no longer felt hot, and I did not think about this mistake anymore (until I read about your recent mistake).

It was not only bigger mistakes (an expensive tool) that made me feel very bad, but also very, very small mistakes like dropping a bit of food on the floor and wasting that bit, as if it was a disaster, as if dropping that bit of food meant world hunger. So, like you I magnified my mistakes into a catastrophe, a disaster.

anita