Choose Your Own Shame Adventure

_{Photo by Alexas_Fotos on Unsplash}

Written by Jess Kyle

What happens in your body and mind in the moments after you make a terrible mistake? For me, it feels like a hot, tingly wash of blood that spreads from my face, down my neck, and into my chest. My heart races, sometimes I get a little sweaty, and I’m unable to absorb any new information for a few seconds (due to the internal fire alarm screaming “THAT WAS BAD! YOU SUCK! EVERYONE IS GONNA HATE YOU!” in my brain).

As a recovering perfectionist, I must disclose that the size of the mistake has historically had little bearing on how much I beat myself up over it. But in cases of mistakes I had no business making - you know, the kind of preventable, easy to avoid mistakes that should probably get us fired - the idea of acknowledging and owning it felt like an existential threat.

I feel it’s my duty to share my tale of woe about one such mistake I made, and how I was left with no choice but to own up to it. And, spoiler alert: it has a happy ending.

Just a little light coding in production among friends

In the late 2010’s, I worked at a company that made financial tracking and analytics software for casinos. My team was doing some routine work for one of our most important clients - let’s call it Jackpot Town - which required us to be logged into their production server. This particular production server was responsible for powering and running all of the slot machines and table games in the whole casino - financial operations quite literally depended on it.

All I needed to do was a simple SQL code update to accommodate some changes that Jackpot Town had made, so that their reports would compile correctly. This type of change would usually take me around 10 minutes or less, so I wasn’t stressed about it, but being that it was a busy day, I wanted to move quickly.

I logged in, typed up the update, and committed the code. Then I decided to hang out and monitor for a few minutes, just to make sure everything went according to plan.

It probably shan’t surprise you to learn that everything did not, in fact, go according to plan.

Suddenly, the memory on the server kept growing and growing until it was completely maxed out. Then came the phone call, almost immediately: “Hey, uh, did you guys make any changes today?” It was Jackpot Town’s IT Manager. All slot machines and table games were down.

“Ope!” I said, as any Midwesterner is wont to do in a situation like that (whether Oklahoma counts as “the Midwest” is a debate for another time), “Let me log in and take a look!” Of course, I was already logged in. And I was already looking. I had brought down the server.

At this point, you might be asking yourself, “Damn, what the hell was she thinking committing code in production like that without even testing it? In fact, why was she on a production server AT ALL before her code was fully tested in development or staging?” Rest assured, I was asking myself this same question. I’ll give you the answer to it in a minute, but first let me tell you what the next few minutes felt like.

I felt that hot wash of shame that I described earlier. My heart was about to pound out of my chest, and I thought I was going to throw up. I sat paralyzed, staring at my computer screen, imagining having to tell my husband that I got fired because I was bad at my job and bad at everything and probably not worth the space I was taking up. I imagined the looks on the faces of my teammates, who I respected and admired, when they realized what an impostor and fraud I was and wondered how I was able to trick anyone into hiring me in the first place. I started feeling tears well up in my eyes and did the thing where you open your eyes really wide on the off-chance that maybe the tears will either go back into your tear ducts or dry up before they can fall down your cheek and catch someone’s attention. I was fully in the death grip of shame.

It felt like an eternity, but that shame spiral had probably lasted about 30-45 seconds when I had another thought: “What will everyone think of me if they know that in addition to letting this happen in the first place, I’m sitting her silently while one of our most important clients loses thousands of dollars a minute? Maybe if I get out ahead of this and confess what I did before everyone realizes it, I can spare some shred of dignity and self-respect.” It was in that split second that I made a decision that, unbeknownst to me at the time, would change my whole approach to accountability.

“FFFFFFFOLKS!” I called out to my team. We worked in a small building, and four of us shared an office meant for one person (we affectionately nicknamed it “the cave”). They all stopped what they were doing and looked at me.

“I’m gonna need all hands on deck, because I have royally fucked up and now Jackpot Town’s entire floor is down.”

Immediately, one person sat next to me and the other two logged in from a different computer; then the search for what went wrong began.

Within about five minutes, I had found the culprit, and it was a mistake almost as dumb as pushing code to a production server without testing it in the middle of the day. I had forgotten to increment a while loop in my SQL, resulting in an infinite loop that kept executing and pulling all the resources from the server like a black hole. We fixed it, rebooted the server, and everything was back up in about two minutes. However, I spent the next two hours after that taking mountains of shit from the team, who could not resist chiding me (and honestly, who could blame them?).

So what happened here?

Back to that question from before - what was I thinking? I’ll tell you exactly what I was thinking:

This is just a five minute change. I know exactly what needs to be done, I can just get in there real quick and get out, and then move on to the next thing. I’ve been writing SQL for 7 years, I know what I’m doing, and it’ll be fine.

Shorter answer: hubris. I was overconfident to the point where I didn’t even think I needed to follow the generally accepted best practice of testing code on a development server before committing to production.

But once the worst happened, I felt like a scared little girl who broke her mom’s favorite vase and was about to be found out.

There was no way to avoid feeling shame over what I had done. But in that moment when I decided to own the mistake, I had a choice over what kind of shame I was going to feel.

I could feel the normal shame of someone who makes a colossal mistake that everyone knows about, which is something most humans experience at some point in their lives.

Or, I could feel that shame plus the additional shame of everyone knowing that I tried to cover it up and keep from getting found out. I’d be seen as dishonest and untrustworthy. I’m a lot of things, but a liar isn’t one of them - it was just too much to bear.

It didn’t make me less embarrassed about what I did, but let me tell you what it did do for me.

It showed me that making a mistake (even a big, dumb one) isn’t the end of the world 

My team rallied around me immediately to help me figure out what happened. And when it turned out that my cockiness led me to do something reckless which cased the outage, they didn’t shun me or decide that I didn’t deserve to be part of the team. They did tease me relentlessly, but in a way, the laughs we shared over it bonded us even more. We also used it as a cautionary tale to drive home how important it is to test your code before deploying to production.

It made me feel a little bit better about myself

When we make a mistake, what’s done is done; but we can then choose whether to move forward on the brave path or the cowardly path. I chose the brave path even though I was scared to death, and one unexpected outcome was that after the dust settled, I actually felt proud of myself for how I’d handled it.

It inspired me to start being more open and honest about mistakes

I started practicing announcing when I messed something up at work. I’d say something like, “Ok folks, I just messed this thing up and I want to show you what I did so that you don’t make the same mistake. And here’s how to fix it, in case you do anyway.”

With family and friends, I noticed myself softening more when someone took issue with something I said (or, more often, how I said it). Instead of doubling down and explaining all the reasons why I was right and they were wrong, I started trying on phrases like, “Ok, that’s a fair observation. I didn’t mean to make you feel that way, and I’m sorry. A better way to say that would have been…”

The more I practiced doing this, the more I was chasing that feeling of being proud of myself. I felt like I was living my values, and it made me like myself more. The more I liked myself, the easier it became to apologize and own mistakes. I changed the feedback loop from a shame spiral into an exercise in becoming the person I wanted to be.

Why this matters

My experience with shame-based responses to mistakes wasn’t unique. Every day there are people at work, at home, in the news, in friendships, on social media, and all over the place who seem allergic to any type of accountability. This kind of behavior damages trust, pollutes work cultures, and can even destroy relationships. It’s driven by our intense desire to push shame away, yet has the effect of making us even more ashamed. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Leaning into taking accountability and sincerely apologizing was one of the most emotionally uncomfortable things I’ve ever done. If I’m being honest, I still to this day reflexively want to hide and cover things up when I make a mistake. It is a constant practice. The difference is that now, I know what rewards are waiting for me on the other side of the mistake. The irreplaceable experience of living my values, the relationships that are made stronger because of how accountability deepens trust, and the feeling of liking myself and being proud of how I handle things all make it worth it to me.