growing up, were you also taught that if you had a single typo in your resumé, it would be thrown out immediately? i kind of wonder what would have happened to my brain if no one had ever told me that.
from that dire warning and lots and lots of other cues from school/ballet/america, i came to understand that if i do not present myself perfectly, i can kiss opportunity goodbye because i am very easy to replace. cool cool cool cool cool.
in fact, i have internalized that resumé thing so deeply that it is genuinely difficult for me to overlook typos. it is elitist and classist and yucky, but wow is it a tough behavior to change, especially when your mother is a proofreader.
i remember finding a letter i wrote to my mom as a kid one time when i thought she was mad at me (we all did that right? typed up a letter and slipped it under our mom’s bedroom door to avoid confrontation? right???), and at the end i wrote something like, “i’m sorry if this has any spelling or grammatical errors.” i couldn’t finish the letter without acknowledging its imperfections before she did. i believed that if there were errors i didn’t catch, my entire message would be invalidated and the focus would be on comma splices or something, instead of what i wrote.
and while there is A LOT to unpack in that little anecdote, i think it illustrates my constant fear of being tossed out over a tiny mistake. and because i live with that constant fear, i expect everyone else to, too. that means when other people make tiny mistakes, i expect them to feel shame about it, because i would. and then when they don’t feel shame about it (because they are healthy, well-adjusted, stable, etc.), my brain explodes out of bitterness and jealousy. it says, “wtf i agonize over everything i type and want to jump off a building when i accidentally end an email with ‘all te best,’ yet this person can just go about their day after having used ‘hear’ instead of ‘here’???!?!!! no fair 🙁 🙁 🙁 “
but how do i know they’re not agonizing, too? wait, why do any of us have to agonize at all? if i understood the message, does it really matter? then again, if we keep lowering our spelling and grammar standards, will the english language eventually devolve into unintelligible acronyms and unintended malapropisms? did this typo really need to send me into a gd spiralizer rn?
i have been thinking about this a lot lately because the world is on fire (as usual) and whenever that happens (every day) i learn about it on instagram. and each time i see a typo on an otherwise beautiful and informative post, i feel a buzzer go off in my brain as it gets ready to discard everything i just read, regardless of how reputable the source is.
i’m trying to disconnect that buzzer. maybe i could move it somewhere else. could i get it to go off whenever i’m about to leave the supermarket without butter AGAIN? that would be much more helpful than reinforcing this toxic idea that flawed = useless.
(but sorry if there are typos in this i’m tired oh no i did it again)