Owing Our Mistakes
Being a good human means resisting the urge to vanish. It is the realisation that integrity isn't just found in the moment of telling the truth, but in the times that follow.
How many times have you heard the truth will set you free? Maybe so, but it conveniently skips over the bit where you first made everyone in the room uncomfortable.
The phrase “and the room fell silent” definitely can prove accurate when you drop a truth bomb. Here’s one of mine.
Some decades ago, I worked at a theatre in Sydney. One or two times a year, we would order ticket stock - the blank ticket rolls that then would feed through the ticket printers in the box office when someone could come in to buy seats for a show.
We had just received our latest order, a stack of boxes holding rolls of tens of thousands of blank stock, probably enough for most of the next 12 months. They were stacked in the middle of the backroom of the box office area. I went home thinking nothing of it, until I arrived the next morning and the boxes had vanished.
A little investigation - actually a conversation with our cleaners - elicited that they had thrown the boxes out, because their instructions were that anything piled in the middle of the floor was rubbish. The big industrial bins had already been cleared that morning.
So I had to troop into the boss’s office and confess that we’d lost a year’s worth of stock because I had forgotten about the standing instructions to the cleaners. It took a day of calling around other venues to find enough blank stock without logos or branding to survive the few days until a replacement batch arrived. I suspect that if we had not been a local council venue with strict HR rules, I likely would have been fired on the spot. Instead, a warning went into my file.
My boss had a reputation for wrath, and this was in full evidence. And holy moly did I want to disappear into the ground. Given a choice between flight or fight I definitely lent towards the former.
The flight mechanism kicks in because disappearing offers a release from the weight of being seen in your most flawed state. In our digital age, this is easier than ever. We can ghost, block, or delete our way out of accountability, reinventing ourselves somewhere else where the slate is clean. At least that’s what we think in the moment.
But choosing to stay is the point where honesty ceases to be a singular event and becomes a practice.
Staying means navigating the period after you drop the bomb, and you have to start rebuilding trust and a relationship.
The psychologist and relationship expert Esther Perel argues that conflict and hard truths are not the end of a relationship; they are a threshold. In healthy relationships, she says,
“the deeper issue is recognised, and we work to chip away at it, moving from rupture to repair.”
The truth bomb is the rupture. What you do next is the repair.
It takes a certain type of resiliency not to sprint out of the room; it’s an ethical act to remain and sit in your discomfort, to show responsibility to the people you have impacted. You might not be able to ‘quick fix’, but running away is not the answer.
Likely, the others in the room will be reevaluating what they know about you, reconsidering previous interactions, and considering what other skeletons might be in the closet. By choosing to remain, you are allowing yourself to be interrogated and witnessed in your imperfections.
Some personality types simply cannot deal with this.
Narcissists embody a fundamental inability to integrate the idea of personal fallibility into a coherent self-image. The narcissist’s identity is constructed on the premise that they do not make mistakes of this kind. When evidence to the contrary enters the room, the psychological threat becomes existential.
So they don’t apologise. They explain. They reframe. They blame anything and everything other than themselves. They endeavour to defuse the truth bomb by relocating it. Somehow, by the time they’ve finished talking, the mistake has become someone else’s fault, or at least everyone else’s problem equally.
What makes this particularly insidious is that it can look, from the outside, like resilience. The narcissist doesn’t flee the room. They stay, but staying, for them, is an act of dominance rather than accountability.
For everyone else in that room, this creates a second rupture on top of the first. Not only did something go wrong, but now the person responsible is recasting what wrong even means.
For most of us, however, being a good human means owning our mistakes. Or, telling the truth when it’s likely unpalatable.
Of course, staying is only viable if there is a framework of safety; owning a mistake is one thing, jeopardising our wellbeing is another. But in most situations, it’s likely shame is the igniter of flight; we want to run because we cannot bear to see a new version of ourselves reflected back at us from the room.
Being a good human means resisting the urge to vanish. It is the realisation that integrity isn’t just found in the moment of telling the truth, but in the times that follow.