Being Called Out

Being called out, especially when you immediately realise you are wrong, is an especially unpleasant feeling. It’s also a curious one - my gut instinct is always to be defensive, to argue that there has been no wrongdoing on my part, even when my gut instinct is very much that I have made a mistake (or furthermore that I have made the mistake as a result of a repeated pattern of behaviour), and simply apologising and saying that I will reconsider my thoughts and words in the future seems all but impossible.

Swallowing one’s pride is a painful experience, especially when one’s whole life they have been raised to be proud. Casting off that fuzzy wall of excuses and actually admitting culpability is intuitively unthinkable, but, to really grow as a person it is clearly necessary. My other gut reaction is to be self-deprecating, to simply say that I’m a sub-par human being and so of course I embody undesirable traits, but that is not going to help me either - and frankly it is this pattern of thinking in general that I am keen to carve out of my own brain.

Sometimes I think or say or do stupid things. And that’s absolutely fine, I think - what is not fine is to continue to do them despite having been confronted with their inherent stupidity. That is what would truly make me a shitty person.