I made a mistake yesterday. My morning devotional inspired me to put a positive message out into the into the universe. So I posted this on social media:

A bit later, I checked Instagram to see if anyone in my world liked me. “Oh shit!” I said loudly, and deleted the post. How could I be so stupid? How could I not have deleted “the” when I decided to change it to “my.” And how could I miss an error in font size 70 on my computer screen? Mortifying.

And yes, several people had seen and liked it. The agony. A stupid typo for the world to see. The very fear that caused me to hide my writing for years. The anxiety that has me check and recheck everything I write and then feel super dumb when I miss, yet another, error.

I then corrected my error and reposted on Instagram with an admittance of my earlier faux pas.

I went to FB to delete it as well, but I can never find anything there. By the time I did find it, I thought you know what? I’m just going with it. I made a mistake. So what? I wrote a comment pointing out the error and added the hand-over-mouth emoji.

There’s a bigger lesson here. My intent was pure and good. I wanted to promote joy and peace. It was a simple, positive message and I had fun creating it and my vibrations were high. But for a moment, I let my public error steal my joy. For years, I wrote–never for public consumption–because I was convinced real writers didn’t make stupid errors; I did. This is what we call a limiting belief. And I was limited by mine.

A bit of magic happened yesterday. People responded positively to my error. “Everyone makes mistakes.” “You made me laugh, so I think what you are writing brought joy to me! Success!” And “I was too captivated by the positive message to pay attention.” Most people reported they didn’t even notice the mistake. Those are my people.

Those who know my heart looked past the error. Conversely, those who find joy from picking at others, well, I guess they found a bit of joy too. Either way, a little joy was spread and that was my original intent. I have a tiny little positive message to share with the world and maybe part of my message is I’m human and I make mistakes. So be it.

In the spirit of joy and peace.