I Peed My Pants at School
I’m in kindergarten during school break and I really have to use the bathroom…
as I’m walking towards the toilet stall all is fine, until suddenly:
I look down at my pants
Oh no! I’ve peed myself
I look around and there’s nobody around, I don’t know what to do…
I don’t remember what happened next, but I think since my mother worked at the same kindergarten I went too, she came and helped me clean up everything.
But from that point onward, I never peed myself at school again.
It led me to wonder…
Did that one humiliating experience teach me something that years of potty training hadn't?
I’m sitting down on the piano and I’m trying to learn Liebestraum (Love Dream) on the piano.
It’s the hardest piece I’ve ever practiced and I’m about to give up. I practice and I just can’t see myself completing it.
so eventually, I just give up…
I quit.
I hate it all.
That piece wasn’t that good anyway.
…
I’m sitting down at the piano the next day, trying to look for something new to practice…
Hmm, none of these pieces really seem fun.
You know what, fuck it.
Let me just try a little bit of Liebestraum, let me just practice one step at a time.
A few days later…
I manage to learn the hardest part of the piece.
I aggressively clap my hands as I jump up.
I slowly learn the steps by repeating the same piano chords over and over. So that by heart I learn to not do the wrong thing.
With the piano, I could hear when something sounded wrong. And each time, I could try to correct it.
But with the toilet accident, I only remember getting it wrong once.
So why do some things take hundreds of mistakes to learn, while others seem to change after a single experience?
When babies learn to walk they have to repeatedly fall. On average they take about 2,368 steps and 17 falls per hour.
But the infants didn’t suddenly decide on the first fall that they couldn’t walk…
they simply stood up, kept moving and gaining experience.
They weren’t necessarily learning a lesson from every fall.
They were gaining experience with every attempt.
And gradually, something that once seemed almost impossible became something they could do without even thinking.
Yet, I’ve had another experience where I made the same mistake consciously for years without ever really learning…
I’m taking food during school lunch, there’s as always a lot of food. But again I look at the amount of food that my friends put on their plate.
I don’t want to take a tiny bit of food, I want to eat like them.
So instead, I take many potatoes. When I literally hate potatoes so much I even threw up once trying to eat potatoes during school lunch.
I’m sitting down to eat.
The rest of the boys are chowing down on their food…
I look at mine…
take a bit here and there…
play around with it a bit…
And then I sneakily put a tissue on top of the food so it’s not really viable as to how much food I will be throwing away.
As I’m by the lunch ladies at the garbage cans…
I look at them and try to see when they’re looking away…
OH, now!
I throw out a whole meal which could feed another kid.
And yet I did this, day after day…
month after month…
year after year…
A decade.
My whole time in school I almost always took too much food to fit in.
For years, I could make the same mistake without changing anything.
But sometimes, one tiny mistake was enough to change how I saw myself.
I’m 14 years old sitting in class during a math test…
And as I’m done with it, I hand it in to the teacher. But I know I got one question wrong.
So instead of letting it go and being satisfied with my great test. I talk to my teacher…
Teacher, I know what the correct answer is! I should’ve gotten it right!
And as he looks at me, he says:
Yes Alex, I understand you know the correct answer.
Yess, I know I got the wrong answer, but now he will know that I’m really smart!
…
Years later, I’m sitting down in high school and I’m taking a test…
I literally don’t know anything about this Pythagoras theorem.
My head is pounding…
the test is halfway in, years ago I would’ve handed in the test early because I was so confident I got everything right…
now, I’m walking up towards the teacher…
almost trying to hold my tears in, as I hand in the test early.
…
As I’m sitting on the train crying…
I’m not really thinking about the Pythagorean theorem anymore.
I’m thinking about myself.
Why am I so stupid?
Why can’t I understand something everyone else seems to understand?
…
But looking back, something seems strange.
When I played the piano, I could make the same mistake 50 times…
and every time I’d simply try again.
Oh, wrong note.
Let’s try that again.
But when I got something wrong in mathematics…
I didn’t just think I got the answer wrong.
I thought there was something wrong with me.
…
And then I think about all those potatoes I threw away at school.
I knew perfectly well that I was taking too much food.
But I kept doing it. Because apparently looking like I ate as much as my friends mattered more to me than correcting the mistake.
And then there’s me peeing my pants in kindergarten…
I don’t actually know whether that one embarrassing experience taught me something.
Maybe I simply got older and developed better bladder control.
Maybe it made me pay more attention.
I don’t know.
…
But what’s strange is how differently I responded to all these experiences.
With the piano, I kept correcting my mistakes.
With the food, I kept repeating them.
And with mathematics…
I started using my mistakes to explain who I was.
I wasn’t just learning what I did wrong. I was learning to think I was wrong.
…
I wonder how differently I would’ve seen myself growing up…
if I had treated my mistakes in life the same way I treated them on the piano.
Something I could learn from.
Rather than something that defined me.
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