Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

by Kathryn Schulz

It takes courage to leave our past selves behind. But it takes even more to carry some token of them with us as we go: to accept that we have erred, recognize that we have changed, remember with compassion our caterpillar past. As difficult as this can be, the dividends are worth it. “The main interest in life and work,” said Foucault, “is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.” Such transformations don’t only come about through wrongness, of course—but wrongness is always an opportunity for such transformations. Recall what I said earlier: if we could freeze the frame on each of our mistakes, what we would see in the center every time would be change. The scale of that change varies widely, but in the end it knows no limits. Our errors can alter our beliefs, our relationships, ourselves. In a sense, they can even change our whole world. We can find ourselves living—uncomfortably, frighteningly, thrillingly—in a place where we can experience things we could never have experienced before. “They say the older you get, the harder it is for you to change,” C. P. Ellis said. “That’s not necessarily true. Since I changed, I’ve set down and listened to tapes of Martin Luther King. I listen to it and tears come to my eyes, ’cause I know what he’s sayin’ now. I know what’s happenin’.”