It’s just a mistake, there’s no point in beating yourself up over it at all.

Try to find a way to laugh it off and either cancel or have a fun time doing something else in the area.

Your mistake is an embarrassing inconvenience. Nobody is hurt, nobody lost their job, you aren’t fired, evicted, or divorced.

Take a deep breath. Self-forgiveness is a skill worth practicing, lest you poison your memories with regret.

I’m here to offer a small story that happend a few years ago.

On one summer day I was working at a hotel reception desk. It was the weekend of the Hungarian F1 championship, the hotel was booked to the brim, we couldn’t house an extra mouse, even if we wanted to.

The day before the event it was incredibly hectic, arrivals every minute, all the guests are tired and some are frustrated by the inconveniences of travel. Hard day for all involved.

In the afternoon a group of Greeks show up. We start checking them in, scanning passports, allocating rooms… wait a second, there’s more people in front of the desk than on the ledger. Well, that’s awkward. We find the guys not on the list and break the news. They swear they have a reservation, a friend of theirs said she’s found rooms when even a traveling agency couldn’t so they came. We believe them, but they are still not on the list. My partner expands the search on a hunch, and we find the reservation. So they made one. For the same day next year. Normally we’d just move the reservation and be done with it. But that day, we didn’t have an empty dining chair, nevermind a room. Neither did any of our nearby sister hotels. The entire city was booked for that weekend.

In that absolute rollercoster we could give them one ray of hope: we had an unconfirmed reservation, that may or may not show. So my manager made the decision to give the room to the Greeks if the other group didn’t show by 6pm. They didn’t, and thus we could house everyone.

Moral for me was that even when all has gone off the rails, usually there’s a solution. It may all seem fucked right now, but when you calm down, you might find ways to salvage the situation.

I understand how frustrating it is. You can tell yourself “mistakes happen”, but that doesn’t seem to make you feel any better.

Imagine instead if your partner had put in months of work to make you happy and then made a single mistake. Would you be angry at them, or would you still love them for the effort they put in and forgive them?

Don’t be too hard on yourself. There are solutions, but it will take time to think of them – even the really obvious ones. Take some time off from concentrating on the problem (even sleep on it if you have the time), consciously relax, then start looking for what can be changed. Strong emotions make it really difficult to think logically.

You may be surprised at how much most people care. Many people will empathise with your position (some who’ve done the same thing) and do everything in their power to help you fix it.

In the end it doesn’t really matter if nothing works out. You’ll still be disappointed, but there will be other opportunities in the future.

I have no idea what just happened to my last comment. I meant to say that I’ve had Air Bnb hosts surprise me before and make exceptions when I’ve needed to make last minute changes. Give it a shot, you may find they are more accommodating than you thought. Most importantly, be kind to yourself.

I’m currently sitting with 11 other people (6 of that kids) in a holiday apartment duplex that is one block away from the one I thought I was booking. That one has a grill for two dozen people, a massive playground with several slides, a rope castle, and a pool. The one I actually booked has two small swings and a slide, ten small wasp nests (which we were able to destroy, thankfully) and a leaky dishwasher. I called myself every expletive known to me when I found out like you have (and I am very knowledgeable about those), but everybody is fine and the kids are having the time of their life.

It’ll work out somehow.

I know the emotional spiral you are dealing with. I am struggling to not let myself fall into that pattern of behavior any more. I believe in you. You made a simple honest mistake. You aren’t a monster and you don’t have a major moral failing. You are a perfectly reasonable human and made a perfectly reasonable human mistake.

Step one: breath. Take long slow deliberate breathes. Acknowledge you are in an emotionally elevated state and this will make thinking clearly difficult if not possible. I find focusing only on the breathing until I feel like maybe you want a nap is a clear indicator I have done enough. lol.

Step two: Acknowledge what happened objectively without assigning blame. A scheduling mistake was made. This is a detail that is important and easy to get wrong. You are neither the first or the last person to make the same error. You haven’t harmed anyone. At worst some people will be disappointed, yourself included.

Step three: What can be done? Can you adjust reservationa to attend the event? If attending the original event is not possible, can you pivot to doing other things for the reserved times? If not, what can be done to get refunds or sell (at cost) your tickets to other people?

Hey, it’s okay. We all fuck up sometimes. Make the best of the time with your family, that’s most important.

Every day everywhere someone makes more or less grave mistakes. People with or without diagnose or issues.

Your error did not kill anyone and while I can emphasize with the resulting fury and disappointment it will pass. Restart and go ahead. You did good, just made a mistake.

It might still be salvageable, if you can find lodgings and arrangments in the general area for the correct week (obviously with the event going on, you might not be able to find prime locations anymore) and then ask the airbnb you accidentally booked if you can get a refund, explaining what happened and how stupid you feel. It depends on if the airbnb is operated by the owner, or a business. If its the owner they might let you off the hook, understanding how much of a devastating fuck-up it is.

I used to be sceptical about these things long before the word “degoogle” was used, but I realised that in my case, it’s worth the loss of privacy. So I put everything into google calendar, and I use the assistant with speech-to-text to input every event, appointment and timespan as soon as I get it for the first time.

A classical wall calendar will never work for people like us. Best we can do is IMAGINE how we’ll just put everything in it.

Still somehow mess up hilariously, but less often now.

Oof! That sucks so bad. But honestly no one was hurt. Maybe your wallet. But maybe make the most of it and find out what else there is do?

You’ll get through it and will laugh at it when you’re older.