In Praise of Mistakes

Last night I couldn't sleep so I walked to my towering bookshelf, the one that has long been ignored for my lack of time to buy and read books, and pulled out Elizabeth Wurtzel's The Secret of Life. It's one of the few books that I can read over and over again and not get bored. "Commonsense Advice for the Uncommon Women", it said. The book is like drinking hot chocolate-- it makes your insides warm and fuzzy and whenever I hold the book, I feel like sleeping beside it or taking it with me wherever I go like a best friend of some sort.





I am an enormous fan of Sylvia Plath (since The Bell Jar and watching Sylvia, her sort of biography). After reading Sylvia Plath and falling in love with her (works and life story and all...), Fate brought me to Elizabeth Wurtzel's The Secret of Life at the local bookstore near school. I was waiting for Alej to pick me up and like I always do when there are no more ways to kill time, I hit the bookstore and browse books. I don't normally go to the Self-Help/Psychology section but the Fiction shelf was too crowded with men. I pulled out The Secret of Life as if my hand was a piece of powerful magnet and this book was metal. I read the first page and the first line drew me closer right away. I fell in love because it wasn't a book full of psychology bullshit that tells you to be this or that way as if it were that easy to deal with the craziness of life. I like how Elizabeth Wurtzel writes-- it's as if she was talking to you-- blunt and very real. Plus, I trust in a Harvard-bred literature (was it English?) major who went through her college years battling drug addiction and clinical depression. She is a survivor and she understands what it's like to be told to do this or that but they never really work. Her name was also familiar to me because I watched the book turned movie, Prozac Nation .

I had to hunt for a copy after that day. Apparently, the one I browsed was the very last copy in that bookstore and it took me months and months too look all over from National Bookstore to Powerbooks. When I gave up, I signed up for a special order from Powerbooks but I got impatient. When my mother went to the States, I asked her to buy the book for me online and voila! I got the book! 8 months later, Powerbooks called saying that my copy came in. Yeahhh.

So last night I flipped over the pages and tried to soak in the lines that I loved most.

"This book is about mistakes. In fact, this is a book in praise of mistakes. May you make many of them along the way. May you make them left, right, and center, and when you do, may you never claim to have profited from them. May you never chalk them up to lessons learned or experiences gained or any of that trite, commonplace bullshit. Just enjoy your idiocy, cry about it and bask in it, and be glad you are lucky enough to have a life that has room for some stupidity and lolling about and kicking around, because, you know, that's how it goes, and that is what it means to be living."

And the quote that I put in my sidebar:

I am not the happiest person. In fact, in the battle between joy and misery, I'd say the latter often seems to prevail. I don't like this, and everyday I refuse, for the eighty millionth time, to put up with another minute of it. But the world does what it does, and I often find it disagreeable. After all these years, I'm kind of resigned to that.

But I do have one thing on my side: I have enormous faith. And hope. I am not speaking of the kind you find in church or in the afterlife or in heaven of in the King James Bibile or in the Hare Krishnas that we all encounter changing flights in the airports of the world. I am speaking of a simple faith that says that one way or another, no matter how many times I stumble and stub my big toe, somehow life is going to work itself out.

The more I think about this line, the more it made sense. I remember in class, the professor explained how there is a psychological theory that the more you think highly of yourself, the more you feel inferior when you're with the better, greater people. Or something to that effect. You get my drift. What I'm trying to say is, don't beat yourself up when you make mistakes or take wrong turns because it's NORMAL. Not making mistakes or being snotty and self-righteous about the mistakes you made makes you absurd. It makes you look more like a fool and nobody likes a pompous person.

I've made a few wrong turns in my life and the biggest one yet is not achieving my goal on the date that was expected. But you know what? I dealt with it and dismissed whatever bad feeling I got for feeling like a loser in the fight because life was that way. It's all about mistakes and as Elizabeth Wurtzel puts it:

"And there are much worse things than mistakes. There are self-importance and smugness and arrogance and all the other traits that are associated with belief. Belief is a good thing in principle, but an annoying thing in human beings. Faith is for people who are not possessed of belief, and faith is a much better thing. To explain: People who believe walk around with a certainty and ease that, in my opinion (which is always correct), they ought to be taken out and shot for. They go around full of belief, they go through life just KNOWING that they will get that plum job, KNOWING that they will meet and marry that plum boy on some perfect and preordained schedule, KNOWING that they will get that apartment on the sunny side of the street-- the one with the high ceilings and bay windows and a marble bathroom and elegant detailing-- for half the going rate, with no problem. They KNOW they are going to win the lottery; they know they will always have a date on Valentine's Day-- and that it will surely involve long-stemmed red roses by the dozen and a fine meal of filet mignon-- and they KNOW that they will always most certainly be happy, even on New Year's Eve."

So you know, rejoice because you're human! Rejoice because you have enormous amount of humility to accept the things you've done wrong and the things you will do wrong in the future. When I think about it, everything worked itself out the minute I decided that I wasn't going to wallow in self-pity. Besides, I'm happier now and I wouldn't have it any other way.

There are a lot more lines/paragraphs that I want to quote from The Secret of Life but that would mean that I'd be posting the whole book here. See for yourself, contrary to popular rumors, the author does not suffer from the "I Disease" (me, myself, and I Disease, rather). She just talks in the first person point of view and relates her opinons/theories with her own life's experiences.

Imagine my delight when Wurtzel also looks up to Sylvia Plath! My two favorite authors. :)

Sidenote: Always find reasons to SMILE no matter how tough life gets!



this is from a forwarded email I got about China's endangered pandas.

I know, this is a ridiculously long entry. I'm like this when I get carried away. :P