As someone who was, for the most part, thought of as one of the smart kids in class, I thought I could not make the simple mistakes that other kids made, like incorrect word use. I made it to my middle school's school-wide spelling bee years ago, so how could I ever misspell something or be grammatically incorrect? What I think all smart kids, nerds and geeks realize later on is that once you make a mistake in a field that you're good at, you get reminded that you don't know it all; you're flawed. So where does this week's gospel come from?

Last semester, I was taking a class about Greek mythology. During an in-class writing assignment, we were asked to write down our opinions on a story we read. If memory serves me, it was about Hades and Persephone. In one of my sentences, I had used "their" when I meant to use "they're". Now, this might not seem like a big deal to you, but coming from a place where I used to laugh at Buzzfeed listicles making fun of people's grammar and spelling mistakes, it was a big, then laughable, deal.

I felt like I was slapped across the face when I saw my professor's correction on the sheet of paper I wrote on. I had all sorts of automatic thoughts like: "What the f**k I can't believe I made that mistake!", "How could I have made that mistake are you f**king kidding me?!", "Other people make that mistake not me!" and "Maybe it's because I look at all those listicles so much that I actually made that mistake in real life".

So how could I have possibly confused "their", "they're" and "there"? I would say that I had that one mistake in my head for about 2 days until I finally let it go. It's quite hard to let go of something so infuriatingly annoying; even harder if you made that kind of annoying mistake yourself. I'm one to obsess and overthink things way too much, so you probably now understand my word-use predicament a bit better.

Looking back on it now, this was a learning moment for me. When you laugh at other people's mistakes, you put yourself on a pedestal; you may subconsciously think yourself superior. I felt that way in the case of other people making "their", "they're" and "there" mistakes. Maybe it was because of relying too much on automatic spell check that I've lost my "mojo". When it comes down to it, it was just a human error, but it's crazy how much meaning we put on one mistake in our lives.

I look at that fateful grammatical mistake with humor now; laughing at how extreme my reaction was, while feeling humbled at the same time. It's important to remember that we are going to make mistakes and feel like we know nothing, but like Jon Snow, we do know some things; that is what makes us unique.