I Misplace Things Lovingly
Why laughing at your harmless mistakes might be a sign of emotional resilience
Last week, I opened my closet looking for something and found the extra cable for my phone charger, which I had been planning to buy.
“What a pleasant surprise,” I laughed to myself.
And lately, my most repeated sentence to my husband has been:
“Can you call my phone?”
“Only to discover I had put it on “Silent.”
I still pretend to search around the house as if I can somehow hear the vibration through pure intuition and locate it spiritually.
Like the gold earrings tucked inside my makeup bag. The nail cutter hidden behind the sugar pot in the kitchen. The markers neatly placed under the weighing machine.
Honestly, even Sherlock Holmes would struggle to solve some of these disappearances.
I am a middle-aged woman carrying a thousand invisible tabs open in my brain at all times — responsibilities, decisions, reminders, emotional labor, deadlines, grocery lists, family logistics, and existential crises running in the background like endless software updates.
So yes, sometimes things disappear. But interestingly, I never lose things carelessly.
I misplace them lovingly.
Usually, I keep them somewhere “safe” away from my children, fully convinced I would remember the genius hiding spot forever. But I never do. Thanks to my once spot-on memory.
I have lived long enough to make peace with the fact that lost things somehow return when we deep-clean the house, move furniture around, or stop desperately searching for them.
Maybe that is why I no longer panic over every small mistake I make. Because somewhere along the way, I learned that mistakes are rarely the end of the story.
The kind of laughter I am talking about is gentler — rooted in emotional safety, not carelessness or insensitivity. The kind that actually allows you to feel the humane side of you in your mundane days.
I grew up in a family of six where humor was never a luxury. It was a basic necessity. It was how we survived difficult seasons together.
Whenever there was a family fiasco, the next day we reenacted the entire thing — everyone’s reactions, facial expressions, dramatic dialogues, and all, while rating the best and worst performances as though we had accidentally turned our emotional disaster into theatre.
We debated over the silliest things, like guessing the sun signs of the hosts on a talk show, and transformed ordinary family moments into dramatic productions.
The best part? My parents never stopped us. They joined in, too.
I remember my dad openly telling us about the terrible mistakes he had made — the reckless ones, the embarrassing ones, even the unbelievably dumb ones he made as a parent — and laughing about them like they were simply part of being human.
He would openly admit to how he doesn’t know what decision to make and go with the majority of votes he got from us. He tagged each of us as odd or even numbers, like we were part of some tiny democratic system at home.
Looking back now, I think what fascinated me most was this: He never treated fatherhood like authority. He treated it like participation.
As a child, that changed something fundamental in me. It taught me that mistakes were never the real tragedy. What came after them — the lesson, the resilience, the ability to laugh, adapt, and continue anyway — was what actually mattered.
He often said, “Nothing is the end of the world.” Not as a quote or a lecture. He just lived it. And watching him do that over the years is proof enough for me to believe it.
There is always another level to grow into. Another version of yourself is waiting on the other side of any failure, embarrassment, heartbreak, or fear.
And maybe that is why I laugh at my mistakes now instead of collapsing under them.
Somewhere deep inside me, my nervous system learned that being human is always recoverable. No failure is fatal as long as you are still here. No embarrassment stays forever. And misplaced things always return.
Life continues moving beautifully forward, even after we forget, stumble, fail, break, or begin again.
© Tamil, 2026.
PS: The story was originally published on Medium.