For the longest time in my life (before recovery), I needed to be right. I worked hard and campaigned to be right.
Like so many things in my life before recovery, it was always about control—trying to control other people, what they thought, or how they thought about me. It was exhausting, for me and for anyone around me.
My close friend Jean McCarthy, host of the popular sobriety podcast The Bubble Hour and author of a series of helpful books on sobriety, knows what I'm talking about, as evidenced by one of her UnPickled blog posts that I read recently. In it, Jean recounts how, one day, after she had expended considerable effort trying to convince her husband of something, her eleven-year-old son, who had been watching and listening, looked at his mom and simply said, "You, like, really enjoy being right." That really impacted Jean.
As she reflected, she realized that she would have been defensive and wounded if an adult had said that to her, but she found herself receptive to the honest observation coming from her own child. Jean and I are both more okay these days with not being right.
It's better to invest our energy in letting go of control than in being right. When we release the need to be right, we learn a lot.