Making Mistakes: Maggie Borders (YP, '17-'18) checks in half way through her CBYX year

Originally published on my blog (Maggie (Without) Borders) halfway through my CBYX year. Edited for clarity.

I’ve been making mistakes for six months now.

(For those of you keeping track at home, that is indeed how long I’ve been in Germany, good on you for noticing.)

I’ve gotten really good at it. It’s like I think something, and it’s incorrect. Without even doing anything, I’ve gone and made a mistake. At this point, I’ve come to think of it as a talent. 

Okay, so maybe it isn’t that bad. But I do think that I’ve made more mistakes in the past 6 months than I have during, say, my entire college career. I wish that part were a joke, but between the new culture, language, schools, cities, families, friends, transport systems… there’s a lot to mess up. 

At some point in my life, someone made it very clear to me that making mistakes was entirely unacceptable (everybody wave to my dad). This line of thinking served me fairly well for a long time; it made me carefully consider each and every action I took, and resulted in the development of a very deliberate and attentive personality. It did mean that I also spent much of my time fretting about really dumb stuff while leaving me completely unable to admit when I had made a mistake, but I was, for the most part, alright. 

It stopped serving me well pretty much the moment I set foot in Germany. Because I had no idea what to do, what to say, what to even ask in order to find out what to do and/or say, it paralyzed me. I couldn’t talk to my host family for fear of saying the wrong thing. I couldn’t feel at home in Cologne because I was too busy imagining all these eggshells that I just had to walk on. I couldn’t speak German because 

what 

if 

I 

use 

the 

wrong 

article 

dear

god 

please 

help. 

This continued until I finally managed to unravel myself a little bit. Not entirely–you know that joke about the frayed knot? 

This is your cue to say, “I’m afraid not.”

Regardless, I was a frayed knot. I had loosened up a bit, but there was still this massive psychological blockage preventing me from relaxing entirely and becoming one big happy pile of string fibers. I started speaking to my host family (but not nearly as much as I would’ve liked), I started to embrace Cologne (but never really got to know the city), and I spoke up in class (…alright fine, I talked a lot. I do that sometimes!). It was nice while it lasted. 

Then I moved to Hamburg. I started f*cking up immediately. My propensity for problem-causing was preposterous. I wasn’t even there for an hour before I went to the wrong bus stop four times before finally finding the right one. I had to cross the same intersection FOUR TIMES to manage this. Incredible.

I think that was also the moment (keep in mind, we’re less than an hour into my ten months in Hamburg) that I started not to care. I stopped caring because I just couldn’t anymore. I was sweaty, exhausted, alone, and very, very cranky. Bite me, crouching tiger of mistakes-to-be-made, I’m ready. 

And bite me it did. I started off at my university on exactly the wrong foot. I recall one fateful Wednesday on which I–two weeks into my Uni phase–triumphantly sat down ten minutes early for an environmental law class in room N4.07. I observed other students, still strangers, slowly start to populate the room. I eavesdropped on a conversation where one student was explaining to another how he was so interested in the environment.

Aren’t we all? I thought, the universe giggling quietly to itself.

Two minutes before class, and the room was full. Students had packets and binders and pencils and pens out on their desks; I had my cappuccino and a notebook filled with nothing but hope. One minute before class, and the professor walks in. He sets up the elmo projector, and puts on… a plastic green visor? Weird. Class starts, and he smacks what appears to be a schematic of a small motor on the elmo’s surface. 

Oh no. 

The little cogs in my brain start turning as the professor procures the exact motor that’s pictured on the elmo.

Oh. No. 

I blink twice. Cut to the laptop four rows up boasting a schematic of that motor.

Oh no.

My eyes widen with realization. Cut to the girl nearby, her once innocent binder now suddenly plastered with a picture of that motor. This is not my environmental law class. 

OH NO.

At this point, I had two options: one, I could stay in this very wrong class for the next three hours. I was not interested in doing that. Option two was to leave my dignity behind, pack my things, grab my cappuccino, and make my escape. 

Pride no longer part of my vocabulary, I decide to flee the room. As quickly and quietly as I could, I gathered my things from my desk at the very back of the room and make my way to the door at the very front. I exit the room, accidentally slamming the door in the process, then giggle maniacally to myself as I recount the whole experience to my still-sleeping boyfriend.

This was absolutely the moment when I realized that maybe, just maybe, making really ridiculous, public, obviously-wrong mistakes was alright. After all, I could always flee with my cappuccino to safety, right? So I was horrendously embarrassed, very shaky, and newly unsure of what the hell I was doing in Germany. So what? It was hilarious. Immediately hilarious. Not like, 

"Looking back, I now realize that it was actually a very humorous situation,"

but like, trying-not-to-laugh-out-loud-in-the-common-area-immediately-after-it-happened hilarious. I was enchanted by this new feeling. 

You may be thinking, “All you did was go to the wrong classroom. Why is that such a big deal?” You’re right. It’s not a big deal. To most people. But to me, it felt like the dumbest thing I could possibly do in front of strangers. And not just any strangers: German strangers. For me, it was the mistake I needed to make in order to understand that giving yourself grace when you screw up isn’t such a bad thing. 

All that said, I still (quite naturally) try to avoid messing up. I'm not the kind of person who can sort of just, I don't know... bumble through life, always running into my own mistakes. I still plan, I still fret, I still care. But I don't fear. Not like I used to. I've given up on perpetually striving for perfect correctness, and I have found myself muttering profanities à la Bill O'Reilly more times and in more situations than I wish to recount. I've learned to take chances, to fail, and then to shrug my shoulders as if I'm physically forcing the embarrassment and shame I've conditioned myself to feel to roll right off my back. 

I've got to admit, I highly recommend this approach. It's freeing; I've learned way more from screwing up—not just little stuff, either—than I ever thought I could. 

Here's to learning to fail, and hoping it leads me to success.