messing up

in my life,

in the past 24 years of my life,

there were times when i messed up.

at 15, i went through a crisis. i got out of it.

i gradually fared better from 17 onwards.

19 to 21 was pretty okay, with slight bumps along the way.

22 and 23 were safe. then at 24, it happened again.

i

messed

up.

i was lost,  i was down.

i felt defeated. i was traumatised.

thrown into uncertainty, i felt small, miniscule, tiny. i wanted to disappear.

it probably isn’t such a big deal. but for me, it was huge, only because of the person that i am – ambitious, passionate, driven. i cannot stand the thought of messing up.

and the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy painted a similar scenario. and as always, there’s the ultimate starting and ending quotable narration; this time voiced by Karev:

“Surgeons are all messed up; we’re butchers, messed up, knife-happy butchers. We cut people up, we move on. Patients die on our watch; we move on. We cause trauma, we suffer trauma. We don’t have time to worry about all the blood and death and crap really makes us feel. It doesn’t matter how tough we are. Trauma always leaves a scar. It follows us home, it changes our lives. Trauma messes everybody up. But maybe that’s the point – all the pain and the fear and the crap. Maybe going through all of that is what keeps us moving forward. It’s what pushes us. Maybe we have to get a little messed up before we can step up.”

- Alex Karev, ‘Elevator Love Letter’, Grey’s Anatomy Season 5.

 

All the pain, fear and the crap. It really does make us push forward. I know for me it does. I might not be a surgeon. I might not be able to hold a scalpel but that does not mean I cannot relate to what Karev’s saying. The gist is clear. The over-arching message is obvious. Yes, the more mistakes I make, the more shitty I feel about myself but that makes me want to NOT be shitty. It makes me NOT want to be messed up. It makes me want to soar above it all. It makes me realise how necessary it was for me to mess up and how I needed that downtime. I needed to know that I’m not all that great after all. Experiences like that humble you. It’s one big lesson in humility and it shoves you a large dose of reality, which although not picture perfect 100% of the time, can be just what we need when the time comes.

Of course the fixing up part hurts . The recovery process does hurt.  But it hurts only because it is in the process. We need to get our egos crushed at times, to be able to resculpt the person we are, so that not only can we grin and bear and learn from our previous mistakes, but also mould ourself into the bright promising individual that we all strive to be. Only difference is that when the time comes, there strife has done most of the work.

So yes, there is a point to it all.

there is a reason why we all have to mess up at some point in life. mess-ups have a purpose. they scar for a reason.

the scars are there because we need to be reminded. we need to realise. we need to get a grip and

clean up the mess.

that’s really what matters most.