Trying to understand Your Own Internal Server Errors

Don't you love informative, helpful error messages? We all do, of course, but given the number of things that can go wrong, we don't always get them.

That was the message I was getting from the Zoho CRM I use for my actual business, marketing writing for healthcare and technology companies. I had to authenticate my email, otherwise they would send my email using their domain, rather my natty sturdywords.com domain. Bad for branding! I'd made all the necessary additions to my DNS record, but no dice, nothing was happening.

Eventually I sent a note to the helpdesk, and someone got back to me within a couple of hours. It turned out someone had blocked something on my account (that's as much as I cared to puzzle out). Now, to be clear, I don't pay for Zoho CRM, except a small fee to occasionally back up all my contacts. I'm a solo practitioner, and they seem to have some sort of soft spot for people like me. So consider this a recommendation of their customer support, which quickly solved my problem even though I must be a net loss to them.

But while I was annoyed at the uselessness of the message, I had to acknowledge that my own messages to myself are not any better. Why am I in a bad mood? Am I hungry? Tired? Anxious? Is this chair uncomfortable? Did I sleep poorly? If I did sleep poorly, why?

There's no dashboard I can look at that shows me blood sugar, organ status, electrolytes...anything, really.

When I was younger I had great faith the power of introspection. I was sure I had privileged access to my internal workings. Who, after all, could have a better one?

But now I know that only a few rooms in the house of my mind are actually accessible to me. Some, maybe, I could get into if I really tried, but fear what I may find there—or worse, that the room is really completely empty.

Other people, people who know me, have access to parts of my personality that can't make myself conscious of, any more than I can see the back of my own head without using a mirror. People who know you can see where you have gone mentally off track. Of course, these people have their own issues, their own interests, and their own flawed perception. And they don't necessarily have your best interests at heart. Sometimes the people who oppose us are those who understand something about us that no one else really does. Some people have a gift for detecting and exploiting weakness. Their self-motivated words and actions might well reveal weaknesses you never knew about.

It takes a village to see yourself. It will a lot of work to correctly interpret the error messages you're getting, but if you integrate your internal blinking lights with external messages, you might have a chance of understanding something about yourself.