Here goes....

Ok so with my project proposal out of the way, it's time to dive right in.

But first, a couple of factoids/disclaimers:

1. I'm female, 29 years old, and Canadian (just for some context)
2. I'm a lawyer (hence the fancy world "disclaimer"), and why I am setting this out in list form. Lawyers like lists.
3. I am not posting under my own real name, and when I refer to others, be they partners in fallibility or otherwise, I will not use their real names either.
4. I'm a perfectionist (durr)

The idea for this project came to me this morning in the shower as I continued to dwell mercilessly about the thing I screwed up at work yesterday. How bad did I screw up? In the grand scheme of things, not that badly. Nobody died, and it does not appear that it will even have any lasting consequences in the long run. Essentially I miscalculated a deadline on something - which, in law stuff has the potential to have serious consequences for both the client and the lawyer's professional record. But in this case, the deadline was actually irrelevant for a number of reasons so it didn't actually matter. Nevertheless the whole thing sent me into a near-panicked state for several hours yesterday and kept me up for most of the night. Why? Well the easiest way for me to explain it is that, aside from working in a demanding job that requires near-impossible standards of perfection, I'm also naturally very hard on myself.

I reacted to my stroke of screw-uppedness by immediately messaging/calling other lawyer friends for moral support and advice on what to do. I consider this to have been a really proactive and mature reaction, compared to how I normally deal with screwing up: festering in deep internal self-loathing while keeping up outward appearances. It is exhausting.  So this time, my dear friends kindly empathized, shared their own stories of similar screw-ups and offered kind words of encouragement that it would all work out fine. In other words, exactly what I would have done had the roles been reversed, and in fact what I have done when the roles have been reversed on countless occasions in the past.

Hearing stories about other people's flubberies definitely lifted my spirits. To a point - I still had to fix the situation and deal with my bosses. But turns out they were pretty good about it too. Part of my problem is that I used to work for jerks - the kind of jerks who dwell on your faults for way longer than could be considered reasonable. I no longer work for jerks, but I nevertheless remain somewhat traumatized by that experience to the point where I immediately assume the world has ended whenever I miss a comma.

So my theory is that keeping a chronicle of the things I do wrong will help me keep things in perspective. Because once I put them down in print, it's easy to see how silly it is to get too worked up about it all... remains to see if the theory will pan out.