Sometimes You Fuck Up, But Does That Make You a Fuck-Up?

Sometimes you fuck up. I do it, you do it, we’ve all done it. My boy St. Paul knew it when he said “for all have sinned…” The great Hannah Montana knew it when she said, “Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has those days.” Nobody’s perfect, you know?

To me there’s two kinds of fucking up. One is when you make a mistake. And it’s usually a bigger mistake to warrant the use of the words “fucking up.” If you spill a glass of water, you’d be like, “Ah, whoops,” but if you gamble away your grocery money, and now you gotta survive on cans of tuna for two weeks, you’d be like, “Ah I fucked up!” So there’s a threshold that needs to be met in order for a mistake to be considered a fuck up.

The other kind of fucking up is doing something that is negatively affecting someone else. It’s not just you any more. There’s someone else involved. We’ll call this fucking up_b and the first kind fucking up_a. Sometimes fucking up_b is just an honest mistake. You agree to pick up your friend at the airport, but you think it’s on the 15th when he’s actually arriving on the 14th. So he’s waiting around at the airport, wondering where you are, calling you. Meanwhile you’re at the bar watching a baseball game. So you go, “Ah, man, I fucked up. I got the date wrong.” So now he’s gotta take a cab. Honest mistake, and not the end of the world, but you fucked up.

Then there’s the other side of fucking up_b, which is where you’re just being an asshole. You’re being rude, you’re being a jerk. It’s not a mistake any more, it’s just bad behavior. I’d like to discuss my thoughts on fucking up_a and fucking up_b in relation to being a fuck-up.

Fucking Up_a

We only get one shot at this thing, so you’re gonna make mistakes. You’re gonna fuck up_a. You might fuck up_a by not studying hard enough in school so you get bad grades. Or you fall out of a tree and break your arm. Or you go on a big shopping spree and get into credit card debt. Or you break up with someone, then realize you shouldn’t’ve done that. Or you get married to the wrong person. Or you take a job that ends up crushing your soul. 

So clearly there’s a lot of ways to fuck up_a, but if you do one of those things, does that make you a fuck-up? I would say, almost certainly, no. There’s almost no single fuck up_a that can make you a fuck-up. There’s big decisions to be made. You might’ve been a young adult thinking, “I could either go to school and pursue this field I’m interested in, or I could try to get a job right now to make some money.” So you pick the latter and many years go by and you think, “Ah, man, I fucked up_a. I’m stuck at this dead-end, low-pay job that I don’t like, scraping by. I should’ve gone to college. I’m a fuck-up!”

Now that’s a simple story, and maybe that person is a fuck-up and maybe not. Let’s just say they are. So it looks like one fuck up_a can make you a fuck-up, right? Well, no. That’s not really how life works. You don’t just make one decision and then the rest of your life just plays out automatically like a Rube Goldberg machine. You continue to make decisions. Things continue to happen. That person may be a fuck-up, but it’s not solely from their biggest fuck up_a. That person had many decisions to make. They could have reversed course after realizing their biggest fuck up_a and gone on to pursue their interest, but they kept choosing not to do so. 

Even with a very big fuck up_a, like marrying the wrong person. Ten or fifteen years go by and you realize the person’s not for you, or they’re just a horrible person in general. You realize you’ve fucked up_a. Again, a lot of things happen in those ten years, and you’ve decided to stay with them every single day. Usually people don’t wake up one day as a shitty person. There are signs. But beyond that, people who marry the wrong person and realize it too late are simply not fuck-ups. When people see someone who’s divorced, trying to put their life back together, they say ‘Oh, they married the wrong person, now they’re moving on,’ they don’t say, ‘Wow, what a fuck-up.’

Fucking Up_b

What about the second kind of fucking up, what I call fucking up_b, involving fucking up other people? Can you fuck up_b in a way that makes you a fuck-up? Yes, you can. But that’s very much the minority of cases. People fuck up_b all the time. You’ve fucked up_b. Your friends have fucked up_b. I’ve fucked up_b. I actually fucked up_b recently. I was being an asshole. An inconsiderate asshole. I was making people feel bad. I was in an uncharacteristically strange and bad mood. Essentially, I fucked up_b. Now I don’t think that makes me a fuck-up for life. I apologized for my fuck up_b behavior, had to forgive myself, and now I’m trying to do better. It happens. 

We can even think about this beyond the terminology of “fucking up_b.” Think about lying. If you lie to a friend or partner, and they catch you in the lie, they can accurately call you a liar. You’re a liar. You just lied. But does that make you a liar, as a person, for your whole life? I’d say no. And I think most people would say no. It follows a similar pattern. You gotta lie a lot to be a Liar, with a capital L. Like George Santos. That guy’s a Liar. 

If you lie, I picture your status as a liar like this:

Right at the point of lying, you’re a liar. You’re well past the threshold of being a liar [blue line]. But if you continue on for a long time without lying, your status as a liar dissipates and fades away. You’re only a Liar, in the permanent sense, if you lie with great frequency. Like this:

The same can be said for many fuck ups_b. In the moment, you’re a fuck-up, but your status as a fuck-up fades away as you continue on without fucking up_b.

But there are other things that are well beyond fucking up_b to the point that once you fuck up_b, that’s it. You are the fuck-up. You could hardly even call these actions “fuck-ups_b” because they’re so bad. These are things like murder and rape. If you rape, you’re a rapist. You’ll always be a rapist. Brock Turner, for example, raped. He’ll always be a rapist. Once someone rapes, they’ll always be a rapist. There isn’t that same fading away effect like there is with lying. Murder is the same. Either way you’ve taken a life, in one way or another. You’ve passed the threshold, and you are those actions.

In that case, it looks like this:

That person has crossed that threshold, and that’s it. That’s the end.

Now, we’ve discussed certain fuck ups_b that follow the fuck up_b curve, like lying and stealing, which don’t make you a fuck-up, unless you commit them with frequency. However, there is also the matter of severity. One does not become a fuck-up if you lie to your dentist about flossing. It’s not that big of a deal. If, on the other hand, one were to lie, say, to the United Nations about anthrax and other weapons of mass destruction, to use a random example, well, then, you just might be a Liar from a single lie.

The other interesting thing about this whole situation is that people’s reactions to their own fucking up_b are so varied. Some kindhearted, sensitive people beat themselves up when they fuck up_b, even if it’s quite minor. They can’t stand it and it makes them feel gross and guilty. Now I’m not the world’s most sensitive man, but I really hated myself for my most recent fuck up_b, hence the writing. Sometimes I’ll just use a slightly impatient tone with a co-worker, and then I’ll be thinking about that all day, condemning myself for being rude. 

On the other hand, there are people fucking up_b all the time, and they don’t give a fuck. They just go through life not giving a fuck how their actions affect other people. They’re assholes. They’re fuck-ups, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve known a few in my time on this here Earth. And when you call these people out on their shitty behavior, they often give some answer like “That’s just who I am,” or “I’m not gonna apologize for how other people feel,” or “everyone does it.” You see, assholes think everyone else is an asshole, so they don’t see anything wrong with it. They’ll fuck up_b everyone else for their own benefit because they think everyone else is trying to do the same thing. 

It’s the same thing with smell. The person who worries a lot about how they smell usually smells good, because they’re so worried about it, so they do all this stuff to prevent smelling bad. But people who don’t really worry about smelling bad are generally the people who do. Ain’t that fucked?