Esteem Cleaning

Say you make a mistake, is your first response, “I’m an idiot”? Paraphrase however you want, we all do it.

I caught my mother doing this the other day. She said something she knew was wrong, and used “I’m so stupid” to segue into accuracy.

My mother is not stupid. She’s slowed down a bit, but come on, she’s 86. She’s still smarter than I am. Of course, being the daughter, I reacted appropriately. I yelled at her for calling herself stupid and then blamed her because I call myself stupid all the time.

That’s my job, and I take pride in doing it properly.

Now I have to yell at all of you for calling yourselves stupid, because I call myself stupid. That is a job done thoroughly.

We have to get out of this rut. We should become instant Zen masters all, and live in the moment without judging ourselves or the people around us, many of whom are idiots.

Strike that.

Ommmm.

Let me start over.

You are not stupid. You made a silly mistake, that’s all. It doesn’t make you a silly person, or a bad one. It takes a much bigger mistake to do that. This was nothing.

We need to feed that monster of the 1990s, self-esteem. You remember self-esteem. We need to give ourselves trophies for showing up and participating at all. With patience, tolerance and humor we need to forgive our lapses.

Not to mention, forgive those who lapse against us when they sound stupid.

Oops. Om.