Learning to tolerate imperfection and ambiguity

Making mistakes, taking accountability, and embracing failure as an opportunity for learning rather than as evidence of weakness. Letting hard and uncomfortable things be hard and uncomfortable.

To be a writer is to make people feel things. Similar to the work of a therapist, writers hold the mirror up to people. We try to make sense of the world around us and we surface what we think need to be surfaced. It is an artform. As a writer, I never know how my work will be received. Sometimes I get it right and other times I things incorrect. I’m human too.

If you follow me closely, you might have seen my latest public mistake play out in the comment section of a post of mine. This isn’t my first time saying something people disagree with and it likely will not be my last. Making mistakes in public, for everyone to see, is hard. As a therapist, I help people work through ruptures for a living. I am no stranger to sitting with people’s big emotions, big thoughts, and big experiences. As someone who writes online, I am also no stranger to feedback, criticism, and insults.

So, I messed up

A few days ago, I posted a quote deck on Instagram where I was hoping to highlight a general misunderstanding about mental health and mass shootings. I wrote about how it might be more accurate to talk about executive functioning, which is the group of brain functions and their adjacent skillsets that allow us to regulate our emotions, think ahead, organize and plan, build self awareness, and initiate tasks. I thought I was surfacing an important layer of the discussion that I hadn’t seen online before. I thought I was adding to the conversation rather than taking something away (let alone hurting others).

At the end of my post, I wanted to provide some hope (and prevent the spread of misinformation that all people with mental health issues or executive dysfunction become school shooters). To provide hope, I mentioned that these skills can be learned (and I added that people with ADHD, autism, and others who are neurodivergent have a different experience learning these skills). I was called in by some folks in my learning circle and then again in the comments on the post. Though not my intention, some people felt I was repeating the same stereotype and pathology I was suggesting we avoid for people experiencing mental health. It was received as making causal links between mass shooters and people who are neurodivergent. I apologize and I take this feedback seriously.

The feedback also highlighted an important learning for me: Even when we are trying to offer support, hope, and encouragement, we can get it wrong and hurt others. I do not get to tell others how to feel but I can choose how I respond and how I address it. Regardless of who is right and who is wrong, I hurt or confused some people, and I’m not okay with that. I should have been more clear in what I was trying to say. I help young people learn and build executive functioning skillsets every day (some who do not have ADHD, autism, or neurodivergence, I should add) and it gutted me to think someone read what I wrote and saw this as a statement suggesting that neurodivergence or executive dysfunction causes people to act violently. I am always learning and growing too.

Hearing hard feedback

I’m going to be honest: hearing hard feedback and changing my perspective or behaviour because of it is hard for me. Growing up, I learned how to be right which means I didn’t really practice how to be wrong. I spent a long time learning the right answers to things rather than learning how to embrace the discomfort of being wrong. I am not just interested in saying it right, I am interested in getting it right.

Letting things be grey, rather than black and white, allows us to see nuance, practice discernment, embrace differences, and hear hard, direct, and challenging feedback. I am still learning this. Hearing feedback, and allowing it to change what you think and how you behave, is hard to do. It is hard to do if a lot of the feedback you’ve received about yourself has been mean-spirited rather than encouraging. It is hard to do if you haven’t had someone hold your experience of accountability with loving kindness. For me, accountability is practiced in community rather than a comment section.

In discussions with a few of my friends and colleagues, I am seeing how parents, teachers, therapists, and those with lived experience received my comments. I don’t know how it felt to receive it negatively because I am not living through it as a resident of the U.S., though I can empathize with the very real fear, stress, and trauma components. Finding my way forward, while incorporating feedback and diverse viewpoints along the way, is challenging. I think many people can relate to the experience of wanting to make “the right decision” while sitting with the complexity of having many options. I am grateful to have a loving community who has my back and is committed to helping me learn and grow.

“Why so defensive?”

In truth, as feedback trickled in I had my back up. I was trying to find more ways to explain why or how I was right and therefore absolve myself from wrongdoing. I got defensive. I know I’m not the only one who does this and lately I’ve been trying to be real instead of trying to be right. The reality is that defensiveness prevents us from hearing hard feedback. It also keeps us stuck in a cycle of trying to identify who is right and who is wrong. It keeps us focused on the problem rather than focusing on people and solutions.

There are two things that keep us stuck in cycles of defensiveness: Ambiguity and imperfection.

Tolerating ambiguity

When things are unclear and unknown, it is hard for us to predict how we’re going to feel in the future. I wish we all had this superpower. As a meaning-making and prediction-based species, we like to know what’s coming. It’s why we worry about the future and why we get sucked into rabbit holes and thinking traps. We want to make the ambiguous less ambiguous as an attempt to resolve our discomfort and uncertainty about what will happen in the future. If we know what’s coming, we can better prepare ourselves for what’s about to happen.

We are not fortune-tellers which means we (sadly) cannot predict the future. Our brains use prior experiences to predict future outcomes even though we’re not good at it. Humans are just not good guessers. If we were, I think we would all be living a lot more comfortably. For me, learning to tolerate ambiguity comes down to one hard-to-accept truth: When we don’t have any evidence, it is impossible to know, with exact certainty, how things are going to play out. Even just writing that makes my gut wrench. When things are less ambiguous, I feel so much calmer, clearer, connected, and certain.

Tolerating imperfection

We only get defensive if we have something to defend against. Imperfection intrudes on our self-worth and challenges the perfect parts of us. To the person who needs things to be perfect, a snag in the sweatervest is likely going to produce some discomfort. Failure, making mistakes, and saying the wrong thing all have the potential to highlight imperfection. To someone who prefers things to be perfect and without flaw, a highlight feels a lot more like a spotlight. Being in the spotlight, and especially if for the wrong reasons, may make us feel embarrassment, shame, or guilt. This is the family of feelings we all feel when our seemingly imperfect behaviour is put up for discussion or evaluation.

While perfectionism is a response to shame, guilt, and embarrassment, it is also deeply linked with perceptions and needing control. Perfectionism says “if I can just control how others see me, I can avoid shame, guilt, and embarrassment.” Perfectionism also says “If I can avoid feeling shame, guilt, and embarrassment, then I will be seen or known as perfect.” Tolerating imperfection is hard to do if you’ve spent a long time practicing how to cover up your flaws. I’ve learned to tolerate imperfection by letting imperfection be there, letting shame be there, and letting big feelings be there. I’ve learned to let hard and uncomfortable things be hard and uncomfortable, simply by acknowledging how I’m feeling and giving myself permission to feel it. Perfectionism wants us to run, hide, avoid, and look away. Tolerating imperfection is about staying put, being seen, not avoiding, and not looking away. Urrrgh— I hate committing that to writing, even though it’s true.

Finding the throughline

I decided to write about this topic this week because of the close personal connection I have to ambiguity and imperfection. I also wrote about it because I know I’m not the only person who makes mistakes and grapples with a process of taking responsibility for impact and acknowledging wrongdoing. I think we’re still learning how to do this in our relationships, at work, and (some of us) on the internet. The throughline for me is that there is no roadmap or one-way-forward. In the absence of having a script, I am learning how to write it as I perform it. That makes for a messy process of accountability, but I’d rather have my process of embracing ambiguity and imperfection be driven by my own humanity rather than it be driven by a deep desire to not be further humiliated.

Like many of you, I sit with the high-stakes feelings of stress and discomfort while navigating the changing world. I’m choosing to let my humanity guide me as I navigate periods of ambiguity and imperfection. This means I acknowledge that I’m a human who makes mistakes. And I will make more. This means I give myself grace when I mess up, when things are uncertain, and when I show up imperfectly.

I wish that for you too,

Jake