Why You Should Embrace Your Mistakes
“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.”—Oscar Wilde
There was a time I was more worried about being alone than committed to being a true friend.
I was only around fifteen at the time, but I remember how it hurt my friends when I let them down. At that time I would have done anything not to eat alone in the cafeteria of our school. I was too preoccupied with what others thought.
Ten years later, I still feel embarrassed to have let my friends down. I’m ashamed of myself for having been a shitty friend at some point in my early teenage years.
I’ve also been a difficult daughter sometimes, lying to go to parties or to see my boyfriend. But wait, isn’t it actually what all teenagers do? It’s true, we all messed up at some point, that’s what adolescence is for.
In fact, that’s also how life works in general. You make mistakes every day, realize you screwed up, try to remember it for next time.
The only thing that differs in adulthood is that most of the time, there’s no one to put you back on the right track anymore when you mess up. No parents to ground you, no excuses like “she’s just a child, she’ll learn eventually that what she did was wrong”. As an adult, you have to take full responsibility for your mistakes—although many like to make all kinds of excuses to justify them.
Growing up, I’ve realized making mistakes is one of the most drastic ways to learn sometimes. Something most historians, writers, politicians, scientists, actors —everyone— had figured out long ago. As Henry Ford once said,
“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
The key is to learn the lesson and try to do better next time. For it is through mistakes and experiences that we grow and become better versions of ourselves. Bill Clinton put it well when he said:
“If you live long enough, you’ll make mistakes. But if you learn from them, you’ll be a better person.”
I could go on and on with famous quotes, but the main idea is the same: making mistakes can be a tremendous opportunity for growth. It depends on how you deal with it.
When you feel bad about something you did, you’re already learning the lesson. You’re already in the process of changing, growing. There’s no benefit in punishing yourself for it, you won’t learn anything more.
It took me some time to take a step back on the mistakes of my early teenage years. When we talk about our high school years with my friends, I still feel bad. They share memories I am sometimes not even a part of since I let them down back then.
This adolescence mistake had a big impact on making me who I am today. I promised myself I would never let something like this happen again, and ten years later I am still that loyal friend I promised myself to be, committed to being there for them any time. It may even be a bit too much sometimes, and I am still working on learning to say ‘no’.
We always talk about forgiving. Forgiving friends, forgiving people in general. Well, maybe that’s the biggest hypocrisy of it all. Yeah, why don’t we start with forgiving ourselves? After all, we’ve been here all along, “for better or for worse”. Celebrating our successes, making it through our worse humiliations.
Yet here we are, blaming ourselves for months for a stupid mistake. Ok, you screwed up, so what? It’s human, just get back on your feet and make sure you learned the lesson. Then eventually, months from now, taking a look back you’ll realize how much you’ve grown.
Besides, maybe we should be ashamed of our past actions, regret our mistakes. At least at first, because that way we’ll try to draw a lesson from them. Then, by the time we become aware of how much we’ve grown as a person, we can see that we are one step closer to success.
