“We’re so excited to see you this weekend!” said my friend over FaceTime.

“What do you mean, the wedding isn’t for another two weeks?” said I.

Then my stomach dropped. The nagging voice of anxiety in the back of my head that I was missing something seemed to know immediately that I was the one who had it wrong.

“I’ve gotta go …”

Turns out, I must have been very focused on the “24” in the save-the-date for 8-10-24 because I put the wedding on the wrong Saturday in my Google calendar and never again consulted the source material as friends handled all the logistics and we talked generally about booking flights “Thursday to Sunday.” I was so anchored to that number that I would see concerts scheduled for the weekend of the 24th and think, “Oh, I can’t go to that, I have the wedding.”

I was so anchored that I even missed the date in this email heading sitting in my inbox:

We ultimately made it to the wedding outside Buffalo, NY, and got to experience the beautiful celebration, but in those first few moments I wasn’t sure that would be the case. It felt like a pretty big mistake.

I have been working really hard at practicing more self-compassion since it became one of Kelly’s favorite books, and this was a real test of that. It felt overwhelming, but I made it through.

Looking on the bright side of life, here are 5 things I liked about the experience:

1. It forced me to have perspective

It’s a bummer and a hassle to almost miss a wedding, but we were very close to just straight missing it, and that is clearly way, way worse.

I am not usually an “it could have been worse” person—I’m a recovering “yea but this was still bad” person. Last week, though, it was easier to see the positive because I could very much feel how devastated I’d be if I missed the wedding completely, and because there were so many clear things to be thankful for. Buffalo is tough to get to, but Rome would have been more difficult. At least I found out Monday instead of Thursday, because we’d probably have had to jump in a car and start driving. And I was lucky it was a mistake that was even fixable in the first place.

In photography, the term forced perspective refers to a technique that messes with our perception of objects to make them seem bigger or smaller, sorta like how Kel looks so tiny next to this bike:

I had a bit of emotional forced perspective, and that made it easier for me to forgive myself.

2. It demanded some solid logistics to fix

I think an interesting MacGyver episode would be for him to book the wrong flight dates for a wedding and need to change them three days before he needs to leave.

He’d discover the customer service phone number airlines try to keep hidden, only to call it and learn that he’d have to wait to talk to anyone other than a robot.

He’d try and rebook online himself but since he used points he wouldn’t be able to use money to pay the difference in fares, but also he wouldn’t have enough points left so he’d have to buy them, but also he wouldn’t be able to buy enough points because there is a daily cap on point purchases that is lower than the number of points he would need. He’d find each of these things out at very different points in the process.

Then he’d have to rebook one leg and cancel the other and buy a different ticket, finishing everything before the machine was able to connect him to that theoretical human.

Actually, maybe this is a better plot for MacGruber.

3. It created opportunities for connection and humor

I saw a friend Wednesday and was telling him about the whole thing, and he said, “Funny we should be talking about forgiveness today,” and then he told me about his day at work. He had made a choice on a job based on some advice from an expert, but it turns out it was bad advice, and now my friend was on the hook for the fix. It was feeling bad, but he knew the only thing he did “wrong” was not trusting himself. We had a great conversation about it, and I think each of us left feeling better about ourselves.

And at the wedding, if I couldn’t laugh at the variety of “See you in two weeks!” jokes, then I’d consider myself a real curmudgeon. As the very wise Conan O’Brien says in the cover quote on this blog post, “If you can really laugh at yourself loud and hard every time you fall, people will think you’re drunk.”

4. It forced me to deviate from my plans and reap the rewards

I had to get a much later flight home on Sunday night, which turned out to be the best part of it all because Kelly and I got to spend the day exploring downtown Buffalo and the surrounding area with exceptional company. It was a day I’ll remember and appreciate forever, and I don’t get to have that day unless I make the mistake of writing the wrong wedding date in my calendar in the first place.

On the way through airport security I saw a person wearing a sweatshirt that said, “What if it all works out?”

As cheesy as it may sound, that sweatshirt was speaking to me. While I may not be able to completely silence the disaster planner inside my head, I absolutely have enough evidence from just this week alone that the optimist should be given the chance to speak up a lot more often.