This morning, as the sun was just beginning to peek over the hills surrounding my home among the broad oaks, I was out for my daily walk in the woods. I stopped to admire an old oak tree that had grown at a strange, almost precarious angle before correcting itself and shooting straight up toward the sky. It wasn’t perfect, not by the standards of a timber farm, but it was majestic. It had character. It had survived.
For a long time, I couldn’t look at myself with that same appreciation. I looked at my history and saw only the crooked parts.
I started my life, technically speaking, as a “mistake.” My parents were two teenage lovers in the 1950s—no protection, just passion and bad timing. They were wonderful, handsome people who worked hard in factories their whole lives. They were great role models who did the absolute best they could with what they had. But back then, resources were scarce. If there was such a thing as family therapy, we certainly couldn’t afford it. The stress of survival trickled down, and I internalized a heavy narrative early on: There is no room for error.
As I grew up, this fear of making mistakes morphed into a crippling perfectionism. Later in life, during my career as a software engineer, this trait went into overdrive. In coding, a mistake is a “bug.” It breaks the system. It causes failure. I applied that same binary logic to my soul. If I wasn’t perfect, I was broken. If I wasn’t managing everyone and everything around me perfectly, I wasn’t safe, and I certainly wasn’t lovable.
The “Big Red Book” of ACA describes this perfectly: “Many of us live in a white-knuckled ‘what if?’ environment created by our own need to manage everything and everyone around us.” That was me for decades—white-knuckling my way through life, terrified that one slip-up would reveal to the world that I didn’t measure up.
Recovery has been a gentle process of loosening that grip. The most profound gift ACA has given me is the ability to finally exhale. I have learned to separate my actions from my worth.
These days, I spend a lot of time thinking about and in my garden. Just yesterday, I was planting some kale starters and realized halfway through that I had completely botched the potting soil mixture. The old me would have been furious, berating myself for wasting seeds, “dirt” and time. The recovered me? I just stood there among the mess and laughed. I chuckled at my own distraction. I decided we were just going to have a few less early season kale plants this year.
This shift has touched every part of my life, from the music I play to, to the food I cook. When I’m in the kitchen preparing a healthy, home-cooked meal, if I accidentally over-spice the soup, I don’t spiral into shame. I just add a potato or two to absorb the heat and keep moving.
What I’ve found is that when we stop beating ourselves up for being human, we unlock a tremendous amount of energy. All that mental bandwidth I used to waste on replaying my errors is now free for better things—like picking a good guitar riff, getting a solid seven hours of sleep, or just sitting on my porch and breathing in the fresh air.
I realized that my parents, in their youth and struggle, made mistakes too. And that’s okay. I make mistakes, big and small, every single day. The difference now is that I don’t carry them around like a backpack full of rocks. I learn from them, I laugh them off, and I just keep walking.
To my fellow travelers: give yourself permission to be imperfect today. If you trip up, don’t look down in shame. Look up, take a deep breath, and realize the sky hasn’t fallen. You are still here, you are still worthy, and you are doing just fine.
