I don’t think anyone likes writing something like this, or that no one enjoys airing out all their mistakes openly in writing.
But I’ve recently been having more lapses in judgment. They’re usually social blunders that could have easily been avoided and where I said or did the wrong thing. I won’t go into detail about what exactly I’ve said or done, but they’re misreadings of situations where I’ve accidentally crossed people’s boundaries or made a blunder that makes other people think “ooohhh, I can’t believe he did/said that,” even if other people don’t necessarily call me out out loud.
They’re bad enough that I recognize what I did, don’t stop thinking about it for a couple of days or a week, apologize profusely, then promise to never do it again.
In my mind, I’m catastrophizing that one of these blunders may have led to me never being on good terms with a friend again.
I get it — everyone is human. But getting into these situations is generally not characteristic of me. Or at least they’re not how I perceive myself. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve made similar blunders between the years of 2020–2022, and yet early 2023 seems to be a time where I’ve forgotten significant social and situational awareness.
A quick Google of “frequent lapses in judgment” gives plenty of search results about the possibility of mild cognitive impairment, early Dementia, or a symptom of Alzheimer’s Disease. As someone who just turned 26 years old, I would (hopefully) like to rule these possibilities out.
I sat through a presentation where “frequent lapses of judgment” was a sign of burnout, excessive stress, and fatigue for lawyers and aspiring lawyers. As someone who is in law school and works a very stressful job in a high-poverty, high-need school district, who also is planning a wedding and dealing with the financial stressors of having a first house, I can attribute every mistake or imperfection in my life to stress and burnout if I really wanted. Ironically, all these blunders have come in the social context of my law school social circles, so maybe part of it is adjusting to different social norms in a different space.
However, I feel like that flat-out evasion of personal responsibility and making of excuses rather than saying “my bad — that was a mistake and it won’t happen again” is a cop-out. No one necessarily taught me this, but I learned at a very young age that when you do something wrong, you don’t make excuses. You apologize, make amends, learn from the experience, and avoid making the same mistake again.
I will say these frequent lapses in judgment are experiences I’ve learned a lot from, especially a lot about myself. As someone who has ADHD (yes, this can be construed as another excuse), I can make rash, impulsive decisions without thinking about the consequences or the effect those decisions have on others. I’m working on it, but sometimes I feel like an outsider in my own mind and body, as if the impulsive things I do and the things I say move ahead of my own agency and cognition.
I also recently spoke to my therapist about always needing to be on the move, and always needing some sort of stimulation or a lot on my plate at all times.
In Peaky Blinders, a show about a Birmingham gang leader who has PTSD from World War I, the main character is always simulating war-like conditions. He battles other gang leaders over territory and tries to find thrill-seeking and dangerous ways to expand his business. The protagonist seems to be the master of his domain, always a step ahead of his opponents, and even when he does suffer a major setback, he recovers and wins.
But it’s in the times when he’s not trying to expand his business and not simulating war-like conditions that his PTSD gets the best of him. When he’s on vacation, he goes on drinking benders, collapses on the couch, drops his glass of scotch and shatters his glass, and agonizes over the horrors of the past. A worker at his house pleads with him to see a doctor. But he refuses.
It’s in the time he stops when he truly processes the trauma he’s gone through and recognizes that he’s not okay. Of course, the story is set in the late 1920s to mid-1930s, so it’s not like he recognizes his need for help or therapy.
I echo this scene because it has resonated with me significantly recently. I’m not saying I have PTSD or anything like that, nor do I go on extreme drinking benders, but I have lived a high-stress life with exposure to a lot of high-trauma experiences. My job is constant exposure to secondary trauma, but there are plenty of life experiences I cannot even write about that I think about in the moments everything stops and when I’m not in a state of movement or action. They’re things that I have a select few people in my life to talk about.
These are the experiences I process through in therapy more than any high-stress daily experience or burnout. I can hear the voice of the older generation, including my parents, who would say “you think you’ve been through some things? We went through X, Y, and Z, and we never had medication or therapy! We just dealt with it.” But that’s a voice I’ve been battling to ignore my entire life.
And so, I think these frequent lapses in judgment are a sign that the past is catching up to me and there are some experiences and processing of those experiences I need to work on. I expect a pace and a life where I can keep moving, keep pushing, and never stop accomplishing things, getting things done, and moving forward.
There is a time and place where that forward progression stops. There’s a time when you need to attend to the wounds and scars that were built up over time.
I can’t promise I won’t make any lapses in judgment in the future because we’re all, at the end of the day, human. But I do think slowing down the pace of life, allowing actually feeling things and stopping rather than pushing the past aside is key.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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