When you’re a child, there are certain rights of passage that are considered building blocks to adulthood. Moments that are anticipated, celebrated and memorialized as the milestones they are.
Yet as an adult, experience provides a type of x-ray lens through which to view the real formative moments of our youth. Ones that shaped us, leaving us impacted for decades, despite there being no pomp and circumstance to mark that they occurred.
For me, one such happening came when I was in the 2nd grade, attending a Catholic school where I donned a scratchy, plaid jumper on the daily, complete with knee socks that were perpetually failed by my spindly legs. It was during this year that I – along with all of my classmates – completed the sacrament of reconciliation, which is considered a lifelong practice of asking for forgiveness for one’s sins.
We will pause here for deliberate, dramatic effect for a reminder that this story takes place in the 2nd grade.
So at just 7 years old the ritual began of me confessing my “sins” to a man, in a box, behind a screen that supposedly prevented him from knowing my identity. One would assume this would evoke a sense of humility, yet paradoxically, my memories of this tradition do not involve the vulnerability associated with an unburdening of the soul in such a way.
No, what I recall the most is that at an age when I was struggling to break 40 pounds, I would stand in line with my classmates, awaiting my turn, intermittently pulling up my knee socks while crafting – in other words making up – sins to share with the man in the box. Regular offenses on my rotation included lying to my mother and fighting with my sister. On more than one occasion, in an attempt to gain some “extra” forgiveness, I confessed to cheating on a test, something my over-achieving, strait-laced self couldn’t even imagine having the courage to do in the first place.
Looking back at this, of course, prompts a humorous sense of irony that a practice designed to teach me to be truthful was being fulfilled by fibbing – a word I used internally to convince myself that my made-up sins were a strategy and therefore justified.
But what I also see in retrospect – with no disdain for my faith – is that I was taught at a very young age that there is power in being able to identify your flaws.
Even if you have to make some up to buy yourself some street cred.
Yet what I have learned from decades of an endless pursuit to be better is that personal development and improvement do not need to stem from zeroing in on perceived imperfections. That while it’s valuable to understand why and where we went wrong in order to regroup and go right, it’s one thing to acknowledge a mistake or a limitation.
And it’s a whole ‘nother to subscribe to a notion where the only way we rise up is by apologizing for being human.
No, putting yourself down is not noble, nor a strategy.
So however you were taught to be “good” as a child, I hope your adult self can be brave enough to question whether those tactics are still serving you at this point on your journey.
Or if they were meant to be a guide for a young conscience that was learning what it meant to have values and aspirations.
One that did not yet know that the real power awaits those who choose to obsess over their strengths – not their weaknesses.