Seeing Red

Here’s a construct we all know and love: the infamous red pen. It hit different for all of us, depending on how you did in school, how much you cared, how much was expected of you. For me, I expected perfection . . . no surprise, given the degree of seriousness with which I took my fundamentalist evangelical worldview.

Oh come on, Adam, surely you didn’t think getting a question wrong on a test was a sin?

No, Italics Lady, not exactly. But I did view imperfections as falling short of the glory of God, a result of my fallen sinful nature. How could I not?

So you got perfect grades and tried really hard in school to show how godly you were?

Listen. You and I both know that didn’t happen. I was never (to my recollection) the Christian who thought I had everything right and that everyone else should live up to my perfect example. I was the Christian who thought I was one slip-up away from everyone realizing I was a total fraud.

But we’re getting away from the path to my point. The red marks. You remember them, yes? The fear that color red emblazoned like lashes of the judgmental whip all across the page? Reminder after reminder of every failure, every misstep, every shortcoming you made on judgment test day? Some teachers would try to break the psychological cycle by using red to signify all the points you earned for each question, but that never really helped. The crimson stains, like drops of the blood of Jesus spilled for you and your eternally damning mistakes, could never be a purely happy sign.

The meaning of red ink was a construct for generations of children taught to measure their worth by their ability to perform successfully in the system in which we were placed. And for particularly die-hard Christians like myself, it was a reminder that we must be—yet we could never be—perfect.

A great writing workshop mentor of mine insisted that no editor should ever use red ink so as to avoid inflicting the trauma we experienced as children on grown-ass adults. Great advice. He told us the story of friends of his whose marriage had dissolved. One of them was an editor. The other couldn’t take the constant correction.

“He was proofreading my grocery lists, for crying out loud.”

It’s a hell of a thing to be reminded throughout the day that you are not enough. You are guilty. You are unacceptable. You need to be corrected. You, without divine intervention, are unlovable. Maybe you’ve felt this, maybe you haven’t. But if you have, you know how overwhelming those reminders can be, especially when they work their way into the mundane elements of everyday life. Wake up, get out of bed, pour some coffee, you’re a failure . . . it’s no way to live.

So tell me, then, what it makes you feel when you pull out your phone and you see this:

I’m curious, does that have the same effect for you as it does for me? Does it feel a little like tiny blots of guilt all over your screen? Over and over, all day long? It does for me, thought not in an acute way. It’s more of a constant heavy burden. But it’s definitely there.

I did adjust the settings on my phone to have far fewer, less persistent notifications, and that has helped with that particular aspect of my psychological slavery to my phone. But what about the settings in my life?

How many reminders am I giving myself that I’ve messed up? How consistently am I alerting others to their imperfections and flaws? How easy is it to ignore my “you’re not good enough” vibe?

There’s something freeing about acceptance. The fear is that if we accept ourselves, others, or the status quo, it’ll never change. But I don’t think that’s true. I believe acceptance very well may be the key to change, specifically change that comes on our own terms. The red-mark, red-badge, bloodstained-judgment brand of change comes from guilt, panic, and fear.

Acceptance, I believe, frees us to change if and how we want to change. Maybe the change you or I need is simply to begin being ourselves and caring for ourselves as we are. No red badge of shame . . . just the growth and healing that comes from peace, acceptance, and love.