I was waiting for my turn to see the doctor.
Just as I was about to go in, my phone buzzed.
I looked at the sender.
The tax office.
An official electronic notice from the government.
What could it be? Why was the tax office contacting me?
For a split second, my whole body tightened.
I almost opened it. But I had to see the doctor.
Still, my mind was heavy, and I couldn’t fully focus on what the doctor was saying.
As soon as I left the doctor’s office, I opened it.
Oh. Just a reminder to pay my property tax.
I already knew about it.
That’s funny. Why had I been so nervous?
I realized how much worry my mind had created in those few minutes.
It reminded me of how I sometimes tense up when I see a police car while driving. I haven’t done anything wrong, yet for a moment, I feel as if I might have.
Later that day, my daughter told me how stressful course registration at university could be. Students all log in at the same time, trying to register before the classes fill up.
She had already set an alarm for the following week, afraid she might forget.
“That moment must make you really tense,” I said with a smile.
“It does.”
We both laughed.
Suddenly, something clicked.
Don’t make a mistake.
The Habit of Getting Things Right
Looking back, I had always assumed this pattern came from my fourteen years as a journalist.
My job rewarded accuracy. Mistakes mattered.
The lifestyle section I was responsible for eventually expanded to three newspaper pages.
We worked for an afternoon newspaper, so we usually finished filing our stories in the morning. Most reporters would then leave the newsroom and return later in the afternoon.
But I would have a quick lunch and come straight back to check the proofs of my pages before they went to print.
I didn’t have to. Proofreaders and editors were already checking them. But they were my pages, and I wanted to make sure there were no mistakes.
I would quickly go through the proofs twice. Not a single typo ever appeared in my section.
Sometimes, when I spotted a typo in another reporter’s article, I wondered how it could have made it all the way into print.
“A typo in a column really undermines its credibility.”
I would sometimes say this to my husband when he was writing his columns, pointing out mistakes I had spotted almost immediately.
Even after I left journalism, the habit stayed with me.
Once, I spotted a typo in a former colleague’s blog post and sent him a message letting him know about it.
“Once a journalist, always a journalist,” he joked.
Later, I visited his blog and read the post again.
He had corrected it.
Long Before Journalism
Suddenly, I remembered myself as a child in elementary school.
I was in the upper grades, serving as class president. One day, I was in the teachers’ office, carefully checking some figures for a teacher.
I no longer remember exactly what the numbers were for, but I clearly remember going through every figure, adding them up, and checking the totals three times to make sure everything was correct.
I took my time checking everything carefully, and I remember how satisfied I felt when I got it all right. The teacher later gave me the same task again, and I did it just as carefully.
Maybe it had started much earlier—at school, at home, or simply by growing up believing I always had to get things right.
For the first time, I found myself asking a different question.
Making mistakes could help me learn and grow.
Why couldn’t I remember anyone telling me it was okay to make them?
