Raspberry Iced M

I want to write today about something that has been racking my brain for the last several months.

There is a belief that many people hold that is basically generalized as follows:

If someone repeats the same mistake often enough, that mistake becomes their character.

I can understand why people think that. Patterns matter. Repeated behavior creates damage. It affects trust. It shapes how others experience us.

So I am not arguing that repeated mistakes are harmless. They aren’t.

But I will challenge the idea that repetition automatically equals permanent identity.

I am that girl. The one that has repeated the same mistakes, over and over again. They say the definition of insanity is to try the same thing over and over again, hoping eventually for a different outcome.

It is very possible that I was not the most “sane” when messing up.

The same cycle…over and over again…for 20 years or more.

I experienced an emotion. Overwhelm. Anger. Loneliness. Boredom. Intense sadness/depression.
I sought immediate relief. And I always found it – in the most temporary of places.
I realized the relief was temporary, and did some of the most dishonest, disingenuous things to hold onto that relief just a little bit longer.
That dishonesty and disingenuousness was discovered, exposed, and defined.
The relief I once had disappeared, as did those who were hurt by my dishonesty and disingenuousness.
I bed-rotted and grieved the loss of those people and that feeling of relief. I pitied myself.
Enter shame. I kept my thumb over top of myself to ensure that I would never again make those mistakes.
I avoided people. Mirrors. And ultimately accountability.

When we repeat the same mistake over and over, it usually reveals something real.

A wound that hasn’t healed.
A need we don’t know how to meet in a healthy way.
Lack of discipline.
A coping mechanism.
Emotional immaturity.
Unaddressed pain.
Selfishness.
Sometimes, all of the above.

Patterns shouldn’t be ignored. But they should be understood accurately.

So the one or two mistakes it usually takes for other people to learn their lesson, for me, it was the opposite. I compartmentalized each mistake in a way that made the pattern disappear, in a sense. If I could rationalize, in my own mind, why each mistake was made, I could shirk responsibility, and redirect each bad decision toward a circumstance.

But in the last 9 months or so, I’ve started to realize how futile that was.

Of course I am responsible. I’m the one who made those choices.
Of course it’s a pattern. I ran from each hard situation in search of relief.
And of course I hurt people. I was dishonest about myself, about my circumstances, about what I really needed.

The last mistake that falls into the cycle of this pattern lasted about 3 years, off and on. And when the mistake was corrected, I instinctively developed tunnel vision. My brain didn’t have the capacity necessary to grieve and take accountability.

So over the last 9 months or so, I have had to adjust my own thought processes. I realized that’s it’s not enough, anymore, to grieve and compartmentalize. Real change requires internal labor. And recognizing my patterns was the first step in the work I am still doing. In fact, I will probably never be “done” working.

There is a difference between saying, “This person has a destructive pattern,” and saying, “This is who she is, forever.”

One statement turns repeated struggle into a life sentence. the other leaves room for accountability and growth.

I had to stop globally defining myself and fundamentally defective. I didn’t repeat those painful mistakes because I enjoyed destruction. I repeated them because the behavior served something.

Validation.
Escape.
Control.
Being chosen.
Avoiding discomfort.

The choices were wrong. But the root of those choices travel deeper than “bad character.”

Character is not what someone does repeatedly in one season, or what someone does when met with a specific feeling.

Character is what I do when I wake up. What I have chosen since I’ve become aware. It’s the fact that I have taken responsibility. That I’ve accepted consequences. That I finally know better. And that I’m putting in the work necessary to pivot from what I know.

Character includes response to failure. Not just failure itself.

There is danger in assigning permanent labels. When we reduce people to their worst repeated mistake, two things happen. One, we feel morally superior. Two, we stop believing change is possible. Those things might feel satisfying, but it’s not the truth. And the irony is that I am able to look at those who have permanently labeled me and written me off and define their own destructive patterns. Gossiping. Avoiding. Judging. Remaining too immature to hold space for change.

Some people stay in patterns. Some people don’t. I’m determined to leave this world having broken my own.

Accountability still matters. I don’t get a free pass. Those repeated mistakes have cost me relationships. They’ve destroyed trust. They’ve had lasting consequences. Of course, other people are allowed to protect themselves. They’re allowed to remember what happened.

But accountability and hopeless labeling are not synonymous.

I am not how I once behaved. Public opinion does not tell the truth. Time and consistency tell the truth, even if other people believe it is “too late.” I spent 20 or more years in a destructive cycle, attempting to meet a need I wasn’t even interested in understanding until about a year ago. And with that understanding comes implementation of new patterns – healthy ones that are uncomfortable but necessary to achieve the integrous life I want to live.

I don’t have to resolve to the fact that I am forever broken just because other people believe that. I don’t have to continue this repetitive destructive cycle just because it’s what I’ve done for a long time. I don’t have to cling to my mistakes just because I spent a long time making them. And I don’t have to embrace being branded as a failure forever just because this particular pattern has revealed brokenness in one area of my life.

I am more complicated than my worst loop. And my strongest character was not formed before the pattern…but in the process of breaking it.