Weekly Nugget: You’re Bad and Wrong—and That’s Beautiful

Hi friend,

There’s a silent burden most people carry: the fear that we’re not good enough. We wrestle with guilt, replay our mistakes, and convince ourselves we’ll never measure up to some grand ideal.

A client of mine recently called me in tears after a breakup, declaring she must be an awful person who can’t get anything right. Yet in the same breath, she insisted she was a good, moral human being. As contradictory as it sounds, that’s exactly how most of us live: we try so hard to appear “so good” while secretly believing we’re terrible. (She is actually an awesome person, in my opinion.)

So, here is my recommendation: Own it. Go ahead and admit, “Yes, I am bad and wrong.” And if someone else hints that you’re “bad and wrong,” don’t defend yourself. Instead, in a mood of humility and humor, just say, “Yeah, and you don’t even know the half of it!”

We’ve all broken promises. We’ve let people down. We’ve run from difficult situations. That’s completely normal. It’s called being human. The problem isn’t that you’re “bad and wrong.” The problem is pretending and proving you’re not. Once you stop fighting reality as it is and fully accept who you have been, you find the freedom to choose who you will be.

Now, here’s the thing:

You can only give something up if you fully own it. If you don’t fully own something, you cannot give it up. Only in total ownership, without judgment, without worrying about looking good, and without reservation can you really begin to let it go. As a human being, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with you. We are simply messy, complicated, and contradictory. Owning our “bad and wrong” is the first step toward becoming something different.

This is the humor of it: when we embrace the absurdity of our mistakes, they begin to lose their grip on us. You’re bad and wrong. And you know what? I’m bad and wrong, too. Accepting this reality, strangely enough, gives us permission to choose who we want to be next. We no longer have to keep up an exhausting facade of perfection.

You can finally say, I own who I have been, and I’m done with that version of myself. And as soon as you let it go, like dropping a heavy weight you’ve carried for years, you might discover that enormous possibilities of being alive and participating in the games of life are waiting for you.

With care,
Saqib