I thought the typo nightmare was over! 

BUT IT WAS NOT. 

I self-published four years ago (pretty sure—I’m so bad with time), and last year I went  through and finally cleared all the errors out after being told by a number of people these mistakes existed. It felt like a Herculean task that I’d worked up the courage and the guts to walk through the text and face the mistakes, and yet, a few weeks ago, a wonderful writer and editor let me know she’d read and loved my book. She also wanted to tell me, although she was afraid it would hurt my feelings, because she knew how important a careful editing is to the reader’s experience, the typos had been distracting.

 “Oh no,” I said, “I thought I got them all!” I felt sick to my stomach. Typos are mistakes, errors, potential shame spirals for the sensitive writer, and every time I think they are all gone, more show up. It makes me think I can never get anything quite right, makes me feel I can’t trust myself. Better not to look. Better to pretend I don’t care. I asked her how many there were. I thought she was going to say three or four. 

She didn’t. 

She didn’t know how many. There were a lot, she said. 

The more I write, the more I typo. 

I don’t know why I don’t see them. Something happened to my brain post-menopause wehre I struggle with spelling in a new and strange way. I no longer see words in my head. This can be frightening, so I prefer to let it slide and be curious instead of horrified. I also wear readers now and can’t seem to focus on letters the way I used to. 

I have to tell you, that, honestly, I don’t care. I mean I do--I don’t want to make errors; I don’t want to look stupid or uneducated or sloppy, but also I can’t help being so flipping pleased that the writing just pours out of me these days. After three decades of trying, I can actually do it! I wrote a book! I co-wrote a movie! I have written more blog posts than I want to count! And all those memes! 

I don’t want to proofread! I want to create. I don’t want to encourage that critical part of my brain that used to tell me reading the same paragraph and tearing it apart for a year was a good idea. But I still want the writing to be clean, to be presentable, to look like I cared.

And yet! 

One time when our daughter was a little girl, she ran into a family gathering, naked, slapped her butt and yelled something like WOOOO! Her father still loves to tell this story. My New England, slightly buttoned-up family got to laugh and enjoy the day that much more because of my ex-husband’s and my unbuttoned daughter’s exuberant claim to life. I don’t want to be disruptive in a pain-in-the-ass kind of way, but I do want to make some noise because it makes me feel alive and real and living on some kind of edge. I want to make some noise because I can, because I was so afraid to do it for so long, and because I work now as a coach for others who are afraid of their own noise and I can see what the world loses because of this fear. I can see the fear serves no one, not even the people these writers think they are protecting. If you are being silent because you are afraid you are going to hurt someone, it seems to me that relationship is not as true or real as it might be, and fake is boring. Fake is dead.

Maybe in a way, a error-free writing feels fake to me. Too polished. And yet, when I see a typo, mine or someone else’s, I don’t like it. I want a text to be clean, polished, error-free. I want to get lost in the words, not have to look at them because they are waving a red flag. 

I want to write a mess and then have someone else clean it up for me!

I want to live in the creative brain and not worry about right or wrong or what time it is.

I want to be a six year old playing in the mud with no worries about the condition of her shoes. 

Why? Because these things are an amazing relief after a lifetime of fearing I would die if I made a mistake. I mean, there were really good reasons why, for thirty years I tried to write a book and couldn’t maintain a narrative. I was so afraid of being wrong. So afraid of being seen. So afraid I had nothing of worth to say.

The fact that I don’t have those fears any more feels like someone just gave me a crown and throne to sit or dance on. (Yes, I spelled thrown “throne” and I had to look it up to check myself. I think “thrown” is so much funnier: The queen sat on her thrown. Typos are so creative!)

Worrying about typos are second to me after cultivating freedom. 

But I want both: clean text and a sense of creative freedom.

 That’s where community steps in. I didn’t mark all the typos! My friend Diane did!! And then I pulled on my big girl pants and went onto Amazon and fixed them all even though the anxiety made me want to throw up. I was so afraid I would clear the thirty or forty or god knows how many there were and seventy more would pop up, unnoticed.

My dad recently read my book again. I told him I was sorry about the typos but that I’d just cleared them all. He said that, yes, they had been distracting. He said that he bet he could find another one.

The desire to be perfect can be stifling. I’d rather have published a book that had errors than to never have published one at all.

I know there is value to being right, to getting all As, to being at the top of your class. I also know there is value in self-expression and freedom. Sometimes you can have all of these things. Sometimes you just do the best that you can out of the sheer joy of being alive.

Here’s what I can’t understand: my book was FULL of errors. Reading it must have been like driving down a road full of potholes, and yet almost no one mentioned them to me. I have almost 180 writings on Amazon, and almost no one mentioned the typos.

How is this possible?

I thought perfect equaled lovable. Still. In my head that is what I believe.

I am waking up.

I have two, newly-proofed copies of my book to send to the first two people who message (wait: is message and message as in I want to get a message for my aching back spelled the same??) me to ask for one. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being with my heart and with my sloppy self. They are both so happy you are here.