Mistakes

How can you accept others’ mistakes when you can’t even accept your own? Making mistakes is a huge blow to your confidence and your ego. What’s worse is when it affects other people.

Today I made a mistake. Not a huge one – it was easily recoverable—but still. My mood instantly changed. I felt ashamed and horrible. I felt like I’d let everyone down. I felt like I didn’t deserve to be happy the rest of the day. My heart hurt, and I was no longer filled with the joy of all this life-changing personal growth I’m doing. I tried really hard to keep things in perspective. It wasn’t a big deal, and no one is perfect. There were no bad consequences except for a little wasted time. Everyone responded sweetly so my feelings wouldn’t get hurt, which was nice of them. They told me stories about times they’d messed up worse than I had. It was really touching that they were so compassionate. I’m not used to that.

The day still seemed to get worse from there. However, while I was very much disappointed in the direction the day took, I still kept myself collected. I knew it wasn’t the end of the world, I didn’t break down into tears and I just tackled each obstacle as it came. I wasn’t flooded with adrenaline and panic the way I usually would have been. At one point I stepped out and just got some air and listened to some calming music, and then went back to what I was doing.

This experience made me think about how I think of mistakes. I have an “it’s the end of the world” mentality about them. “You should have known better”. I am constantly making sure I am careful, that I plan everything out and pay attention to all the details to make sure I never mess up. And yet sometimes it still happens. Sometimes you miss something. I put such an emphasis on NOT making mistakes. I’m so strict about it that I can’t even live up to my own standards. How is anyone else supposed to?

I’m still kind of floating in this negative feeling at the moment, but I think this realization will help me with acceptance once I can look at it objectively. No one likes making mistakes. And if they can genuinely see that what they did is a mistake, well that’s something. Owning up to their actions and doing what they can to fix it and make sure it doesn’t happen again. That’s really all you can do. A lot of times that’s really all it is – a simple mistake. It isn’t always the end of the world.