Making mistakes

I made a mistake driving on the Isle of Skye on our Scotland road trip and almost crashed into another car.

If you’ve ever been to Isle of Skye, you’ll know that


- Sheep 🐑 and cattle 🐄 walk freely around on and off the roads
- Said roads are JUST wide enough for one car
- You’re supposed to stop at a “passing place” to let approaching cars pass - whoever is closest to one of these places stops first.


I was doing FINE, and then this song came on the radio. Bruce (my husband) got really excited, bobbing along, while I’d never heard it before, and said so. It must have been from his youth or something, and I … really didn’t like it!  So I was concentrating, listening intently trying to find out why he jammed so much with it, when he suddenly shouted “STOP!”.

I was SO concentrated on the song that I completely oversaw an approaching car and had failed to pull into “my” passing place, that was indeed a lot closer to me than the other car. The other driver was NOT impressed, and red cheeked I awkwardly reversed back into the place. There was NO thank you wave from the other driver, and you know what, he probably thought I was a complete idiot (which I kinda was, in that moment).

So we drove on, thank god the terrible song had ended, and I noticed I felt absolutely awful, and started spinning out in I shouldn’t be driving, what’s wrong with me, what must the other driver think of me, blah blah.

Basically, I had made a mistake, it affected someone else, and my brain wanted to go to town on me; analysing all the ways I was wrong as a driver and a human being, what would Bruce think of me as a driver now (tough sh*t, the car was rented with me as the sole driver), and basically make me feel ashamed the rest of the day.

And it really hit me, that I had the choice to just let it go. Not come up with excuses around why it had happened, not try to prove now I AM a good driver, not analyse all the ins and outs of it. Apart from getting less involved in the music choices, there wasn’t much else to learn from it, so absolutely no point in beating myself up.

This may seem trivial, but as a veterinarian who burnt out to the ground years ago, being able to stop the inner critic in its tracks feels like the greatest victory of all times. Having that awareness, knowing I have a choice in how I want to think and feel about it, and consciously decide to let it go, feels like having supernatural powers.

Can you relate?