Something happened to me recently that made me realise the gap between how I see the world now and how I used to see it. Not a dramatic shift. Just tiny daily movements, the kind that are available to all of us if we're paying attention.

An old story, for context

Scroll back to 2023. I had a laser appointment with a practitioner I'd genuinely come to consider a friend. An incredible listener, someone I felt real warmth toward. She was running late one evening and left me waiting out in the cold, while I could hear her chatting away with her client before me. It was cold. I'd had a bad day. After about ten minutes, I walked away in a rage. I was furious.

I never saw her again. When I tried to rebook months later, she wouldn't take my appointment. The loss was mine, not hers. She was wonderful at what she did, and I'd burned that down over ten cold minutes.

Fast forward

A lot has happened in the years since, and last week I did something that had never happened to me before. I missed a cover class. It was as simple as reading 7am instead of 6am. A Monday morning. And I went through every emotion you can imagine: shame, fear, guilt. Heart racing, sweating, a full nervous system rollercoaster.

There was no hiding it, so I owned it. I messaged each student with a genuine apology. I felt terrible. Every part of me soaked in shame.

The studio owner I was covering for said something that's stayed with me: "We've all done it, but you'll only do it once." She's right. My body will do everything in its power from now on to avoid that particular feeling again. Those students got up for yoga on a Monday morning and got nothing but disappointment from me. That sat with me for a while, weighing me down.

And then something shifted. Most of the students messaged me back. They saw the human in it, and they told me it was okay. They let me off the hook. The harder question was whether I could let myself off the hook.

I carried on with the day, the week, and the weight slowly faded to the back of my mind. Then the next cover for that same class came around. The Sunday night before, I didn't sleep a wink. I'd also agreed to cover someone else last minute, so this Monday was going to be full, and I hadn't slept at all. My body was doing exactly what it's supposed to do, helping me avoid the feeling I'd had the first time. Annoying, in a strange way, but also a kind of biological genius. The day went well. I got through it on sheer joy of teaching. Holding space for people is a gift, and one I genuinely love.

Then it came back around

This week I had an appointment I'd driven twenty-five minutes for. I got there and found out I'd been double-booked and sent away. This time it was an instant opportunity to let someone else off the hook. To say it happens, no issue. I even told her I'd missed a class myself the week before and how awful it felt, but that it happens to all of us.

She was glad it was me. And honestly, so was I, because it felt like the universe had rebalanced something. The karma had adjusted. I'd let people down, and then I was let down. I was given grace, and then I gave grace, and somehow all of it felt right with the world. Things have a funny way of circling back, if you let the experience teach you the lesson while you're in it.

What actually changed

It's a fairly ordinary story. But the difference between expecting other people to live up to the impossibly high standards I used to hold myself to, for no good reason, and recognising the human in each of us, is enormous. We all make mistakes. And it's in seeing that we're all the same in that way that we can give each other room to make them. They can be frustrating, sure. But isn't that the whole challenge of being human? Choosing which version of yourself you want to be, living it, and believing it until it starts to feel natural.

This wasn't a conscious decision I made one day. It was something I only saw clearly by comparing this experience to the one before it. And it's not that I needed to make a mistake first in order to learn this, although it would be fine if that were true. It was that in choosing how I let something affect me, I was able to let it move through and then go.

It was awful that I let people down. I felt every bead of sweat, every heart palpitation. And then I moved through it without suppressing it, without trying to navigate it away before it had finished. I owned it enough for it to move all the way through me, and then it released. That's what created the space to be okay with someone else's humanness when it was my turn to receive it.