Brain Shuffle

Years ago a friend suggested I try out The NY Times Spelling Bee. I was already a devoted Wordler by then so I figured it could be fun. I immediately decided it was not fun, that it was annoying, and I did not pursue the puzzle beyond a few days.

Then, I heard an episode of The Hidden Brain that inspired me to try again. I don’t remember the topic of the podcast, but probably it was about changing perspective. The expert being interviewed talked about his obsession with Spelling Bee, noting that he really likes the button you can push to rearrange the letters and how sometimes this can prompt your eyes to see words you couldn’t see the moment before. I had quit playing before I clued into this button. Now I was curious. 

That “rearrange the letters” button made all of the difference. These days, I’m pretty hardcore. I score GENIUS level on the regular and even when I don’t, I find it difficult to go to sleep until I have at least reached AMAZING, the penultimate level. I like to think this practice is helping to keep my aging mind in shape, but maybe I’m just killing time. Considering what I did to kill time in my youth, which was, among other things, terrible for my liver and my self-esteem, Spelling Bee is not such a terrible hobby. 

I suppose it’s this daily habit, specifically hitting that shuffle button, that got me to recently notice, in my mind, that CONDEMN and COMMEND share all of the same letters.

To set the scene—I had whipped myself into a frenzy over a mistake I’d made, and I was absolutely beating the shit out of myself. At the same time, because I am forever trying so hard to unlearn wrong messages from childhood, I simultaneously brought my awareness to the idea that self-flagellation is not the direction I want to continue to go in. Been there, done that, have an entire collection of imaginary I SUCK t-shirts that I started acquiring six decades ago when, as a little child, I was told on the regular I was bound for hell based on one small perceived infraction or another. 

I had just wrapped up a small weekday wedding, performed for fewer than a half-dozen guests, and I was obsessively ruminating on how I had fucked up the ceremony. Typically, my anxiety and hypervigilance help me to be a very good officiant. I check and re-check the script before we begin. But on this day, I had been distracted while clipping the document into my fancy wedding book. I failed to notice that I had not removed the first page of an older ceremony. 

Only as the wedding commenced, did I notice the names of bride and groom were incorrect. This confused me, seeing as I was still unaware of my error. In a nanosecond, and without the couple or their guests being aware, I decided that possibly it was the right ceremony and that the wrong names came courtesy of some failure on my part or the couple’s part to cut and paste their names into verbiage borrowed from the samples I’d sent them to compose their own ceremony. 

(My Fancy Wedding Book)

I rolled with it, spoke aloud the correct names, flipped to page two and saw that, in fact, it was page one of the correct ceremony. This is when I began kicking myself. Still, I did not let on that there was a problem. I’ve done somewhere in the vicinity of 2,000 weddings in 18 years and I’m professional enough to know not to stop the show and say, “Oh shit, I fucked up, can we start again?”

I also knew not to bring it up right after, when the couple was basking in their newlywed glow. And also that perhaps they hadn’t even noticed—they didn’t seem upset. But still, the perfectionist monster roared awake. Stupid stupid stupid. How stupid I was for getting it wrong. The Stupid Song has been playing on my mental jukebox for a very long time and I know all the verses by heart. 

In the parking lot, I composed a brief apology email and noted that I would be sending a partial refund. Later, the bride replied that this had not been necessary and, in fact, they hadn’t noticed and had been very pleased with the wedding. 

I couldn’t help but remember the biggest wedding fuck up I ever made, at the very same venue. On that occasion, I simply failed to show up. Yes, that’s right. On one of the most important days of this other couple’s life, I was nowhere to be seen. There was no excuse for this—it was in my calendar but somehow I overlooked it. By the time the frantic groom got through to me (I had been ignoring repeated calls from an unrecognized number, mistaking it for robo-spam) it was too late for me to get there on time. Fortunately, a talented guest did the honors.

Still, I raced out there—I needed to sign the license to make the marriage legal since my stand-in was not qualified to cover this part of my job. I still remember the voices in my head, the one telling me to speed up, the one telling me to slow down because if I caused an accident in my panic, that would make a sucky day suck harder. I imagined being screamed at. I told myself that though I wanted very badly to bawl my eyes out, I shouldn’t do that because it would be wrong to make this be about me and my panic attack, to hold it together, apologize, avoid vomiting. 

I will be forever grateful to the young woman—Sister? Bridesmaid? Friend?—who, upon my arrival, confronted me and let me have it, told me they didn’t want to see me, let me know clearly what a piece of shit I was. I’m grateful to her because she personified the loudest voice in my head, the one telling me how awful I was. Hard to say why I’m grateful to her, but maybe it’s because when an external voice takes over for my internal voice, it allows me to work through things, feel a little defensive, and, in my defensiveness (which I did not voice out loud), do a little inventory that includes examples of me not being a total piece of shit.

But it was the mother of the bride I will remember most. She saw how distraught I was and she said to me quietly and with the deepest compassion, “Until you can walk on water, you’re going to make mistakes.” Despite the biblical reference, she didn’t get super Christian about it. This was her perspective and her message got through to me. She forgave me and I needed to forgive myself. 

I still cried a lot later that day. Even after the couple sent me an email telling me they knew I was a wreck and to please let it go, that they were already laughing about it. I’m telling you that even now, more than five years later, when I allow myself to remember that day (which I strive not to), my stomach still pretzels. 

Though it hurt as bad as ever to recall this truly botched wedding as I drove home from the far-less-botched wedding, the memory served as a reshuffle button. I observed myself condemning myself and there was the word in my head CONDEMN and then it switched to COMMEND. Could I—I asked myself—turn things around and commend myself for having compensated for my mistake so smoothly and imperceptibly that no one even noticed? Could I take some credit for keeping my cool, rolling with it, and in doing so providing them with, if not the exact ceremony we’d agreed upon, a ceremony they very much enjoyed?

Nah. Not really. Not yet. But such is the nature of the slow trudge to reprogram a mind that was conditioned to see negativity from the get-go—in others but most especially in myself. Still, I keep at it, reminding myself to be grateful for the mercy that has been extended to me, to remember to pay it forward when I’m on the receiving end of someone else’s mistake. Which, yes, is something else that doesn’t always come easy. But with every mistake I make, certainly becomes easier. 

NOTES:

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Guess what? I just got a new puppy! Her name is Mercy. Isn’t she fabulous?