I keep a whiteboard on the floor, leaned against the wall. I use it as a type of art canvas. Every so often I will wipe it clean and draw a new image onto it. I like how easy it is to just begin again with a blank canvas, that it doesn’t have to be so permanent and unchanging, so rigid and fixed. Maybe I just like that I could erase my mistakes.

The other day I stared at the whiteboard, a drawing of multiple eyes with my handwriting sprawled below it, “It’s not about what you are looking at, it’s about what you see.” I held a small white cloth in one hand, and some cleaning spray in the other, ready to clear the board and draw a little branch for the Christmas season. As my mind often does, it wondered, to another whiteboard, during the holiday season, a few years back.

During a routine morning meeting, the lead asked a volunteer to take notes on the whiteboard. As the meeting went on, she needed to erase something as ideas began to change and evolve. She reached for the eraser and swept it across the board. “Uh oh…” she said with a little panic in her voice. She had written in permanent marker. We quickly found another whiteboard to move forward. He asked her to continue taking notes. “Are you sure you trust me?” Without a pause, he replied, “It has nothing to do with trust. It was a mistake. We all make mistakes.”

I think about that moment a lot. When I want to erase things I’ve said or done, but can’t. When I feel like I’ve lost someone’s confidence or trust in me… or lost confidence and trust in myself, often over a small error.

If there is something I could do to fix my mistakes, I need to let myself resolve it without feeling like it has stained my value. But if the mistake can’t be easily fixed, I need to accept it and move forward. I need to accept that making mistakes are a part of being human, are a part of me, but also recognize they are only a part of me. I, myself, am not the mistake.

In the end, we were able to salvage the whiteboard. Here are a couple tips to remove permanent marker.

1. Use a dry-erase marker to draw over the permanent ink. Cover the marks as completely as you can, and wipe as usual. You may need to do this several times, but you will see the permanent ink slowly fade away.
2. Or you can put a small amount of hand sanitizer, rubbing alcohol, or non-acetone nail polish remover onto a clean, soft rag and rub gently over the whiteboard.
3. If neither of the above works, you can try using a pencil eraser. However this might damage the surface of the whiteboard.
4. And if all else fails, you can buy a new whiteboard. That is always an option. You don’t have to hold on to things.