The Art of Being Wrong

Admitting we are wrong—or were wrong—is hard.

Which is precisely why I think it is important to do.

I apologize a lot.

I apologize when someone runs into me.

I apologize for asking basic questions.

I apologize for basically existing.

And yet, I have a deep need to be right when it actually matters.

To absolve myself of the need to apologize.

I find it easy to apologize for the small things that are clearly not my fault.

And much more difficult to apologize for the bigger things—the things for which an apology is justified, needed, and frankly, the right thing to do.

I don’t apologize nearly as often for those things.

Because I can usually find a reason I was right.

Or at least justified.

I have a friend I know I wronged many years ago.

Whenever I mention it, my other friends like to tell me I didn’t do anything wrong.

But I did.

I know I did.

And I refuse to forget that I did.

Not to shame myself.

Not to live in guilt forever.

But to live in reality.

To not absolve myself of what I did.

To not give myself a pass for bad behavior.

And hopefully, to remember it well enough to do better the next time.

Of course I apologized.

But it took me a long time because I was too busy justifying my actions in my own mind.

“But they did ______.”

“They hurt me too.”

“It wasn’t on purpose.”

But I knew.

I knew I hadn’t done the right thing.

That doesn’t mean they did nothing wrong.

It doesn’t mean I went searching for a way to hurt them.

It doesn’t mean what I did was intentional.

But it does mean I acted against the person I want to be.

Against the way I want to treat people.

Against the way I want to be remembered.

I think part of admitting when we are wrong is remembering that who other people believe us to be is not always the whole of who we are.

People sometimes tell me I am naturally pretty.

And I always want to laugh a little.

Because I don’t even know what I look like naturally.

Sure, I know what I look like without makeup or a fake tan.

But I have been coloring my hair for so long that I have no idea what color it actually is anymore.

Mostly gray, probably.

My mom spent a lot of money on my teeth. Who knows what they would look like if she hadn’t.

I don’t have Botox or filler or anything like that, but let’s not pretend I woke up like this.

Whatever you are seeing has been assisted.

And that doesn’t mean the compliment isn’t true.

It doesn’t mean I have to argue with someone who thinks I am beautiful.

It just means I know there is more happening behind the scenes than they can see.

I feel the same way when someone tells me I am a good person.

My immediate thought is never, Yes. That settles it. I am good.

Not because I hate myself or believe there is nothing good in me.

But because I know myself.

I know what other people do not see.

I know where I am selfish.

Where I am defensive.

Where I have been dishonest.

Where I have hurt people.

Where I still have a tremendous amount of work to do.

The good things people see in me are real.

But they are not the whole story.

And the things I regret are real too.

They are also not the whole story.

Maybe humility is allowing both to be true.

I can receive the beautiful things people see in me without using them as evidence that I have never been ugly to someone else.

I can believe I am kind without pretending I have never been cruel.

I can know I am loved without deciding that everyone who has been hurt by me must be wrong.

I can be amazing.

And I can fail.

Neither truth cancels out the other.

But if I become too invested in protecting the person everyone thinks I am, I will never be honest about the person I have sometimes been.

Being wrong doesn’t mean groveling at the feet of the person you hurt for the rest of your life.

But it does mean acknowledging what you did.

It means apologizing.

It means asking for forgiveness.

The relationship may already be ruptured beyond repair. An apology does not guarantee reconciliation.

But I don’t know of many relationships that have been made worse by someone taking honest responsibility for the harm they caused.

I have had the honor of attending a few AA and Al-Anon meetings in my day, and one of the things I respect most about the process is that making amends is part of it.

But amends are Steps Eight and Nine.

They don’t come first.

Before you make amends, you take an honest inventory of yourself. You acknowledge the exact nature of what you have done. You admit it to God, to yourself, and to another person.

Only then do you begin identifying the people you have harmed and making amends where you can.

There is a reason there are entire steps dedicated to this.

Because conducting a true examination of ourselves—our actions, our motives, and our hearts—is hard work.

Work that requires honesty.

Work that doesn’t allow your friends to tell you that you did nothing wrong until you decide that you did, in fact, do nothing wrong.

Work that doesn’t allow you to point toward someone else’s imperfections and use them as permission for your own.

Work that requires you to examine your motivations instead of throwing up your hands, saying, “I didn’t mean to,” and calling that enough.

It is work that sometimes requires us to say:

I was selfish.

I was manipulative.

I didn’t think about—or care enough about—the repercussions.

I lied.

I stole.

I chose to think about myself without considering you.

And then, after taking that inventory, we admit it.

We make amends where we can.

This is an incredibly biblical idea, but you do not have to be a Christian to practice it.

It is simply wise.

Because it is okay to say we were wrong.

That we did wrong.

We are in good company.

If we are honest, every one of us has wronged someone.

Just straight-up wronged them.

And yet, I hardly ever hear anyone admit it.

Not that I think we need to walk around wearing sandwich boards that say, “I have hurt someone 117 times,” for the whole world to see.

But I also don’t think we are supposed to walk through life believing that every friendship lost, every breakup, every family rift, and every coworker who stopped speaking to us was entirely someone else’s fault.

If I can look at every person who has come into and gone out of my life and not find even one person I treated badly—one person whose hurt I contributed to, one person who may have had a legitimate reason to leave—

then I am probably lying to myself.

And worse, I am keeping myself from growing.

My relationships will not improve if I refuse to acknowledge the ways I have damaged them.

I will simply repeat the same patterns over and over again and continue calling them someone else’s fault.

I am learning that it is okay to admit I was wrong.

Maybe my honesty will open the door for someone else to be honest too.

Because admitting failure does not create more failure.

It creates the possibility of growth.

Pretending we never do anything wrong prevents that growth. It also teaches the people around us to hide their failures because we have shown them there is no room for imperfection.

And that is where shame grows.

In hiding.

In secrecy.

In all the things we cannot admit because we believe admitting them will destroy us.

I feel guilty for the times I have wronged people.

There have been many.

But I am trying to let that guilt change me instead of allowing shame to hide me.

Guilt can say, I did something wrong.

Shame says, I am something wrong.

I don’t want to live in shame.

But I also don’t want to use grace to avoid accountability.

I want to tell the truth about who I have been.

I want to make amends where I can.

And then I want to become someone who chooses differently the next time.

Because being wrong is inevitable.

Refusing to learn from it is a choice.