I had a gifted student in one of my writing classes who wrote frequently about life and family and personal experience. I realized one day that she had never written about a mistake she had made, or acknowledged ever making a mistake.  You cannot, I said, be a writer if you cannot look at yourself and do yourself and your readers the service of knowing that you were often wrong.

There has never been a perfect writer, there will never be one, not one who’s any good. What can we learn from a life without mistakes? What can we share?  She left the class.

I’ve written five memoirs and you could wrap them all up into one book and call it “amazing mistakes I have made.” Mistakes are the stuff of life, I believe I am defined much more from my mistakes than my wise decisions. If I cant see my mistakes and learn from them, and admit them openly to the world, I will never know myself and can never be the writer or the person that I hope to be.

When it comes to acknowledging mistakes, I know two kinds of people, those who do and whose who never do. I find my friends and the people – and writers –  I admire make a lot of mistakes and admit to them freely and openly, if not always joyously. One of the tragedies of our political system is that it demands of our leaders that they live lives without error or mistakes or confusion. In other words, they cannot admit to being human, or worse, they cannot be human.

Acknowledging mistakes can be liberating, even exhilarating. I call it the Freedom Of  Wrongness.

Like Beavis & Butthead, because I am stupid, I am free. There is nothing anyone can say about me that I have not said about myself. It can also, of course, be painful and disappointing. I wish I had made fewer mistakes in  my life, but I am not sorry to be a human being who is alive. I will be honest and say every mistake bites a bit, I regret making so many, sometimes I am covered in welts.

I could devote an entire writing life to the mistakes I have made and still make. In some ways, I do.

Those of you who follow the blog and read my books have witnessed a giant catalog of my mistakes.  It seems that just about every day I discover another mistake I have made and try to learn something from it. This is somewhat new, for many years I didn’t know about all the mistakes I made, and could not have owned up to them. That has changed.

Some mistakes are small, some bigger, some are dinosaur-sized. I also know there are people who accept my mistakes and people who can’t or won’t. I don’t begrudge people their mistakes. I understand.

I never thought of quoting Marilyn Monroe but she once told an interviewer (thanks, Google) that “I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.”

I love this sentiment, and I shivered a bit at how easily I saw it fitting me, as I am not too much like Marilyn Monroe. I have written several times, and it is true, that when you read my writing, you get the good Jon Katz and the bad Jon Katz, but you always get the real one.

And if you can’t handle the bad one, you are not entitled to the good. That’s the deal. I do not aspire to be adored or agreed with, either makes me nervous.

Truth is the cleanser of the soul, the pathway to authenticity. If I cannot be truthful about myself, how I can be truthful about anything else?

And mistakes are the windows into the self.

If people can not see past my mistakes, if they refuse to look at me in a new light and can only see me for what I was, if they can only see me in terms of my mistakes, then they have to go, and be out of my life.