How to Not Fuck Up a Fuck Up

You went and did it. You went and fucked up, didn’t you?
You made a big mistake and you’re trying to figure out what the hell to do about.

Maybe you got in a fight with your significant other. Maybe you let down a good friend. Maybe you did something detestable at work that nearly got you fired (the day job you’re looking to quit anyway but not quite yet).

Whatever the case may be, you went and fucked it up pretty damn bad. And lemme guess. You want to fix it, huh? Of course you do!

You’re searching the Interwebs for some band-aid solution to fix your job, relationship or what have you. You’re in pain right now and it seems like the best way to heal that pain is to well, fix whatever schitty-a-tion ya got yourself in.

Well, I’d hate to break it to you, but there’s really not much you can do about it. Shit’s fucked up and that’s how it is. You’ve just got to accept that. You’ve got to forgive the fact that it happened. Like it or not.

Furthermore, while fixing the issue may be the obvious solution, it’s not the ONLY solution. Another solution can be, well, to move on.

Now I know, that probably doesn’t seem like something you want to do nor does it make you feel good or remove that sour taste in your mouth, but I ain’t here to blow sunshine up your ass. I ain’t about to give you false hope that whatever sort of shit you got yourself stuck in is easily solvable or even solvable at all.

You’ve got to face the mere fact that you somehow fucked up and there’s no going back. And sure, you might be able to fix it. But at this point, you gotta rule out that possibility entirely. You’ve got to be able to go with the flow. Adapt to what happened. Don’t try to change it.

It’s better to admit something is broken than to attempt to fix the unfixable. Now I don’t say that to make you feel downhearted and hopeless, quite the opposite in fact. I say that to inspire you to let bygones be bygones -- to let fuck ups be fuck ups.

And most importantly, you’ve gotta forgive yourself. But I already went into great detail last week on how to go about forgiveness, and I recommend familiarizing yourself with that material before reading this article.

Thing is, there really isn’t a one stop solution to fixing your fuck up. 

Fortunately though, you can take steps to prevent your fuck up from becoming any worse. 
Think of it as how to not fuck up a fuck up.

That’s what we’re going to cover here today.

I mean you already fucked up. At this point, your goal is not necessarily to make it better, contrary to popular belief. But to just not make it any worse than it already is.

I know. Sounds a bit counter-intuitive. You’ve probably been led to believe that the best way to handle your problems is to tackle them. Head on.

But I’m here to tell you that’s not only inefficient, it’s just simply impractical. Anyway, without further ado, let’s dive….right into it!

You can’t unfuck yourself once you're fucked.

The universe is moving perpetually towards more fuckery, “chaos” as the scientists put it. Certainly, you can create a better future and avoid the mistakes, the fuck ups, that got you to where you are in the first place, but you can’t change what actually took place.

See, you can’t actually “fix” a fuck up. You can’t go back. What’s done is done. But you can adapt to the fuck up. I’ll talk briefly about what I mean, but again, I want to focus here today on what NOT to do once you fuck up.

A tree cut down can’t become a tree again. It’s now a log. Once something is destroyed or otherwise altered at a fundamental level, there’s no going back or reverting it to its prior state. 

Perhaps it can reach a similar state, but it will never be exactly the same. Think of it like leftovers. You can freeze and reheat them all you want, but it ain’t gonna taste the same as when it was cooked and served fresh.

The same principle applies to the mental and emotional space we live in. Shit changes once it’s fucked.

You may have just permanently scarred your relationship or opportunity. But don’t let that discourage you.

A log can be fucked even more and burn into ashes. Those ashes can be fucked and used to make soap or even make an insect repellent. 

What I’m getting at here is that just because you fucked up in one way or another doesn’t mean you are fucked completely. The reality in which you lived no longer exists, that’s all.

It’s time to adapt to the new reality or set of realities you’re experiencing. This is about not becoming too attached to the past and being open to how fucked the universe becomes, even if you, as a freethinking being, caused that fuckery. 

The interesting thing about all this, this life, this universe, is that everything in existence, plants and animals, even non-living things, experience this “fuck”. We all experience the ever-changing chaos.

A deer, for example, loses his home because someone decided to build a house there. 

What sets us apart as human beings is that we experience all these rapid changes consciously.
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We are aware of the happenings, all the fuckeries, and the implications of them.

And not only do we experience them, but we also have the power to create them.

 A deer is not consciously aware of the bigger picture of how someone decided to start a construction project in his domain. All he knows is there’s some other animal taking over his territory with some sort of destructive process. It’s way above his head how that’s all happening.

He doesn’t make a decision here about what to do about it either. He just relies on pure instinct - survival. If we were that deer, or perhaps if the deer had the same level of conscious awareness as we humans are, we’d take the act of someone destroying our home as a personal insult, as some sort of attack or invasion.

The deer doesn’t have this concept, nor does any other animal really. One could argue that the deer does in fact feel emotional pain (and of course physical), but the ability to process how or why that pain is there, yet alone make a decision on how to react to it is something beyond its capabilities.

It may fuck up and stand in the headlightsto get hit by a speeding pickup truck.  If it ever had the chance to learn from this mistake, it would be reliant on instinct alone (bright lights = death!), not some sort of rationale of what a vehicle even is.

That’s what sets us apart! The ability to rationalize and think about our experience as it’s happening.

In short, as humans, we are consciously aware of times when we fucked up and when we get fucked over.

A mouse doesn’t “fuck up” by choosing to settle in your home. He’s just looking for a place with food and that can keep him warm. He ain’t thinking “Oh I’m gonna sneak into these people’s home and steal from their pantry while they're asleep.”

He relies on instinct to find food and that just happened to be in your home. Now we might think to ourselves “Oh that little guy fucked up” and react with a strategic plan of setting up traps.

But he didn’t fuck up, conciously, anyway. The universe kind of fucked up in that sense. The mouse being part of the universe caused “a fuck.”

As beings with consciousness, we like to add personification to things that lack the level of consciousness that we have, like thinking “the little mouse bastard fucked up by coming here,” as if he decisively made a plan of action to infiltrate your home.


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We make decisions. We make choices.

The pain you feel when you fuck up is really an enlightenment of “Wow, I had the power to change the entire course of the universe through my own words or actions.”

You’re a fucking creator.

Now sometimes you create good things. Sometimes you create bad. But either way, you totally fucked the universe. You in some fashion created your current reality, as fucked as it is. You’re responsible for that.

It’s an extraordinary concept to think about.  Woah dude, gettin’ deep n’ shit.

But seriously, that means you can choose the way you “fuck” in the future.

So now with that deep philosophical discussion out of the way, let’s take a look at how to not fuck up your fuck up (and make it worse….a LOT worse)

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DON’T Make Excuses

So you fucked up. Now you’re gonna excuse yourself  for your actions, words, or behavior telling yourself that it’s just “who you are” as a person.

You scoffed down a box of a dozen donuts when you were trying to lose weight because you’re a “fat piece of shit”

 You just went through a huge break up recently because you’re a “hopeless romantic.”

You just screamed at your boss because you have anger issues.

Look...

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, louder for the people in the back: 

Just because you FUCK UP, doesn’t mean you are A FUCK UP.
Stop making excuses for yourself.

Remember, you are the creator. You have the power to create the identity you see yourself as.

Don’t define yourself by your mistakes. Don’t believe you are a fuck up just because you fucked up. 

It’s not who you are or what you’re about, not fundamentally. It’s a fuck up and it happened. Come to grips with that, but don’t be saying it’s a personality trait or anything.

While you can’t change what happened. What’s done is done. What’s fucked is fucked.

You can certainly change what you do and how you behave in the future. You’re not relying on pure instinct. You are a thinking, rational being.

You decide what you do and how you do it. There’s no arbitrary force compelling you to act a certain way. Not unless you yourself write it to be that way.

By telling yourself that you’re a loser or whatever horrible title you denounce yourself as, you will in turn do things that fit the negative role you set yourself up to be.

By excusing yourself or writing off your fuck ups as some sort of definition of your character, you are making it impossible to actually learn from them and adjust in the future.

You fucked up. Make no excuses for it. It doesn’t matter what you were thinking and feeling at the time.

If you do excuse yourself, you’ll only give yourself greater reason to fuck up in the same way if a similiar set of circumstances arises. For example, if you fucked up by yelling at your significant other after “a stressful day at work”,  then you’re using the “stressful day at work” as an excuse to act irritable. Not cool, dude.

(You shouldn’t be schlepping to work at a 9 to 5 to begin with. But that’s another topic.)

You get the point though. You’re responsible for your own emotions and how you react to them.

Certain shit is gonna make you feel...well, rather shitty. But that’s NO EXCUSE to act shitty.

You can fuck up once in a while. It happens to the best of us. But to consistently fuck for the same reason, under the same set of circumstances, that would go beyond just fucking up. That would make you a fuck up.

But even still, you don’t have to define yourself that way, or be that way for that matter, as long as you are willing to cut out the excuse making and take responsibility for your own actions, despite how shitty you may be feeling.
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DON’T Make a Scapegoat

A scapegoat is an object of blame. That could be a person or a thing, but it’s basically a token that represents the notion that “it’s not my fault, it’s theirs!”  

While an Excuse is Internal, like the way you are feeling, a Scapegoat is External, like someone close to you.

Whenever we make a poor judgement decision, it’s so easy to  place the burden of guilt and responsibility on someone or something else.

We blame the computer for not working properly the night a paper’s due, when it was us that decided to procrastinate and wait ‘til last minute to even start it. It’s not the computer’s fault the paper didn’t get written in time.

We blame our wife, husbands, boyfriend, girlfriend, neighbor’s cat, mother father, that damned mouse -- anybody but our own damn selves.

One fo the worst things you can do when you fuck up is to fail to admit that it was in fact your OWN fuck up. It was in fact your fault

Sure maybe someone or something else fucked you over, but it was your decision, your choice, to react to it in the way that you did or maybe it was decisions prior to that that inevitably led to certain circumstances (eg. deciding to wait ‘til the last minute)

And look, I ain’t sayin don’t procrastinate. Heck, just look at the title of this blog. But don’t blame something external for own damn procrastination. Procrastinate with Purpose.

If you make someone or something else the object of blame for your fuck up, you are telling yourself that you lack control. You are telling yourself that you’re not the creator.

Creation is control.  Every decision you make has consequences. You can’t put the burden of blame on someone or something else just because you don’t let the current set of consequences you’re dealing with.
Deal with it.

DON’T Live in Regret

While you must suck up to the fact that you fucked up, without any sort of internal excuse (emotions, etc.) or external scapegoat (friend, significant other, inanimate object, etc.), you can’t be hard hearted about the wrong that you did.

I mean, it’s one thing to come to grips with the fact that you did indeed fuck up. It’s another to haunt yourself in eternal guilt, drowning yourself in endless feelings of self pity and despair.

Mistakes are Meh. You always gotta keep that in mind. No matter how badly you fuck up, your life isn’t a complete fuck up or failure. Shit happens. You live n’ learn.

Be open to the “game over” screen of life. Like playing a video game and leveling up, you’re gonna reach that ole screen of failure, but you learn and adapt, and eventually “beat it”.

Failure is just part of the learning and growing process. You may fall down a cliff, but you know how to time it right and jump over it next time...or at least get a little better at nailing it.

 Shit is only as big of a deal as you make it. A fuck up really isn’t the end of the world.

Sure it caused a disruption in the universe, but what you’re experiencing is a microscopic part of the grand picture.

The struggles you face are nothing more than a bit of dirt on the road,  small disturbance that’s only as distracting as you make it.

Humble yourself and realize that you’re not the only person in the entire world that makes mistakes. Nor are you the only person that feels pain because of it.

We’re all fucked in some way or the other.

Don’t regret what you’ve done. Just make a promise to yourself to do better next time.


After all, doing it better later is the way of a true procrastin8r.








Take it easy,

N8
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