Mistakes, I’ve made quite a few…

A beautiful lady I know and adore updated her Facebook status yesterday with a quote by George Bernard Shaw:

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”

I don’t know about you, but I find this a big relief. I mean, if Georgie B says we’re doing it right, there must be some point to all those fuck ups and missteps – right?

Here are some ways I can think of that have made my life an entirely honourable pursuit:

  • Misspelling the word ‘ecstasy’ in a year 10 spelling test (something I was used to nailing without a problem – other mistakes were made related to ecstasy in my twenties but we can talk about that another time)
  • Thinking green eye shadow would bring out the green in my hazel eyes when I was 15. It didn’t.
  • Wagging a good portion of year 11.
  • Letting my mother home-perm my hair – turning out less like Kylie Minogue and more like Craig McLachlan.
  • Marrying an enormous tool at the age of 20, only to realise the error of my ways not even a year later. This episode has since become known as my practice marriage and is spoken of only in incredulous tones.
  • Catching a bus with said ex from Perth back to Brisbane directly after the split – three solid days on the road to discuss where we went wrong in very close proximity without shower facilities.
  • Tencel jeans.
  • Not learning to drive until I was 32, so missing loads of opportunities to go anywhere that wasn’t on a bus/tram/train route.
  • Dating any bloke called Craig.
  • Taking a job wearing a XXXX bikini and sitting in a dunking machine in the middle of winter while the Brisbane Bandits were having a night out on the tiles.
  • Deciding to go for a stroll on my own at sunset in Istanbul, and forgetting where I was staying and the name of my hotel.
  • Ordering that third dirty martini on my poor husband’s birthday.
  • Stopping for breakfast at The Big Prawn.

Okay, your turn. What mistakes have you made that have made you more honourable? Or at least more interesting?

Written By

Carolyn is the editorial director of Champagne Cartel and a freelance writer. In her spare time she is a long-distance runner, peanut butter enthusiast, and single mum to three incredible humans.

10 Comments

  • I, too, had a practice marriage and should have recognised it was never going to work out when we had a discussion about regrets. Turns out that he had a lengthy list, itemised by category and arranged by date! Six weeks later when he’d finished taking me through them all, he asked me about mine. I’d about lost the will to live at that point, so thankfully my philosophy is that if you are happy right here, right now, then every step and misstep taken along the way has been necessary to get you to this point. But I played his game and so I thought and I considered and I pondered and seriously, the only thing I could think of is that I was pretty annoyed that I didn’t buy shares in Metway when I was offered them for a buck each. That still fucking irks me. Of course, if he asked me now, I’d probably add “marrying your sorry arse, you dick”, but even during that entire dreadful episode, I learned life lessons that means my real marriage is strong and fulfilling.

  • Love your mistakes and can relate to quite a few – possibly the only one I could give away without being shamed into oblivion is the fact that I had a perm the day before my wedding.

    You can only imagine the others if that’s the one I’m owning up to

  • Love your mistakes. Not sure where to start with mine lol. They all kind of start with the boy with the mow hawk. It was all a bit all over the shop after that x

  • oh see I think your mistakes are actually kind of cool. My biggest honourable mistake was accidentally on purpose shooting a kid in the leg at school with a popcorn gun because e was an asshole to everyone. Honourable yes? Mistake… um yes…. actually now you have inspired me to blog about that incident 😉 xx

    • That’s a GREAT mistake! Please alert me when you publish so I don’t miss it (not that I EVER miss your posts!).

      You also reminded me I broke a girl’s nose at year 9 softball try outs by throwing a softball at it. Fittingly, I made the A team and she was relegated to the B team (after she recovered, obv.).

  • Soooooo many assignments handed in late at uni. I only lost 2% per day. So every day, it seemed that yes, I was most certainly going to be able to add MORE than 2% worth to the assignment with an extra day, so the balance tipped. Until two weeks later I’d still not added any more… whoops… EVERY TIME.

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