Call It an Erratum

I was a printer by trade, and printers have a particular word for the mistakes that survive into a finished book. We call them errata. When I came to write the account of my own life, I deliberately used that same shop word for the things I had done wrong.

I did not call them sins and I did not call them regrets. I wrote that taking unfair advantage of my brother over the indentures was one of the first errata of my life. A plain technical word, borrowed from the trade, applied on purpose to my own conduct.

Consider what the word actually does. A sin needs forgiveness from somebody else. A regret has no remedy at all, it only aches. An erratum is a printing error. It is factual, it is specific, it is locatable on the page, and the printer's response to finding one is not shame. It is a correction.

So I kept a list of mine. Not to punish myself with and not to explain away. I set down what the error was, where it happened, and what the corrected line ought to read. Some I could repair directly by paying a debt or making an apology. Some I could only record honestly and leave standing.

Change the word and you change what you do next. Stop calling it a failure. Call it an erratum, write out the corrected line, and set the next edition. No printer burns the book because one page came out wrong.