Sometimes you drop a ball.
You didn’t do a thing you were supposed to do at the time you were supposed to do it.
There isn’t really a good reason. Things got away from you. You forgot. You thought you’d assigned that task to someone else and there was a miscommunication. Or the person you assigned it to dropped the ball.
This doesn’t mean you, your assistant, or colleague is incompetent. Sometimes these things happen.
Whether you have an official diagnosis or not, if you are an adult who is neurodivergent in some way (or thinks you might be), this kind of thing might trigger all kinds of terrible feelings.
After all, you’ve probably had a lot of experience of this happening in the past. Even if you’ve developed systems to address the more common issues, sometimes those systems fail.
There is nothing wrong with you!
Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone.
Most of the time, when you’ve calmed down from the initial reaction, you try to figure out what happened and create or update your systems to prevent it happening again.
But sometimes, you look at what happened and you know that your system just failed randomly.
You look back over a longer period of time and realize that it’s been a long time since you’ve dropped this particular ball. Your system does work. It just failed once.
No big deal.
You become a bit more attentive about all the parts of your system for a bit just to make sure.
Random doesn’t look how we think it does
Most people assume that if something similar happens multiple times fairly close together, that it wasn’t random.
If you’ve ever decided to knit a scarf or a sweater with stripes of either random width or random colour changes (or both), you will probably have confronted the fact that sometimes you get blocks of colour that are bigger than you thought. Or one colour is more dominant in the overall garment than you expected. Even when you used a dice or some other random number generator.
Sometimes your systems randomly fail in 3 different ways in one month.
From the outside it looks like you have no systems and you are just incompetent.
But you can see that those were 3 different things, each of which hasn’t happened for a long time, but which all happened in a short span of time.
This is when you invoke mercury retrograde, pixies, or some other supernatural cause that you aren’t even sure you really believe in. It helps.
Self-compassion FTW
As an adult who’s had this kind of brain your whole life, you might also have a long history of being told you are incompetent, lazy, or stupid when these things happen. You now have a gremlin who turns up to repeat some of those things. You might have other physical reactions including pain or nausea.
It sucks.
That physical feeling you get will probably always accompany this kind of dropped ball. It’s okay.
That feeling is a signal. It’s a reminder that you care about this thing. You feel bad that you made this mistake.
Don’t make it worse by berating yourself for feeling how you feel. Or for needing some time to feel those feelings and let them pass.
You can acknowledge the feelings, and give them some time and space, without exaggerating the seriousness of your infraction.
This is hard. You can do hard things. It’s okay to need support to get better at this.
Once the feelings are under control, you can look at the facts and decide how bad this is. There may be consequences for you or for other people.
Forgive yourself first.
Do what you can to repair things…
Apologize to the people affected. Even if there is nothing you can change, you do feel bad that this happened. Acknowledge that you dropped a ball and that affected them. Say sorry.
Keep it short. Don’t overexplain. They are allowed to feel how they feel about it, too.
If there is anything you can do to mitigate the consequences, do it. Sometimes there is nothing that can be done. If you’ve missed a hard deadline, you’ve missed a hard deadline. That thing won’t happen. This also sucks. For everyone involved.
Take the time to look at how this happened and assess the risk of it happening again. Maybe you do need to update your systems. Maybe you don’t. You need to decide based on the facts.
You can never reduce the risk to zero. If you are going to change things, you can briefly explain what you are going to do to prevent this happening again in future.
Most people are understanding. Some people are not.
Sometimes you are going to lose a relationship and/or opportunities because of the person who is not understanding or compassionate. You get to feel grief for that. And, you need to remember that the pressure of working with someone who is not understanding about this kind of thing is probably not worth it.
Carry on.
The most important thing is to not let it derail you.
Let this be a small thing. Limit the impact on everything else.
It’s okay to feel a bit nervous as you do this. You might be extra careful for a while.
Learn what you need to learn and carry on.
You have important work to do. Go do it!
Related Posts:
Treating each day as a new opportunity
You’re coping, until you aren’t.
