Let me start off by saying — I get it. None of us are perfect, and we all make mistakes. I’ve made countless mistakes so far: buying the wrong shade of foundation and channeling an Oompa Loompa for days, and eating Chinese before a heading to Midtown. It seems like when we make mistakes, we have a tendency to be harder on ourselves than we would be on others. Our mistakes become amplified, and we allow them to define us. How many times have you made a joke at a friend’s expense, or made a reference to some dumb thing they did a few years ago?
You can deal with your mistakes in a series of ways — some of us own up to it, and others attempt to alleviate the blame. I’ve found that the best thing to do is to admit you were in the wrong — I mean, you were. Accidents happen, but it doesn’t give you room to shrug off the incident and say “it’s not my fault.” The consequences that follow your actions are still there, whether they were intentional or not.
As college students, we’re “adults” in a technical sense, but you can’t really call yourself an adult until you’re able to take responsibility for your actions. (That’s right politicians, I’m looking at you.) Our generation has been big on honesty, and we take pride in it. But if we do value honesty, we should also be enforcing it. The best way I’ve heard it said was by Jon Stewart: “If you don’t stick to your values when they’re being tested, they’re not values: they’re hobbies.”
On that note, acknowledging your mistakes is only part of the deal. We tend to beat ourselves up, even over the little things. We say things about ourselves that we would never take from someone else. So what makes it acceptable to treat ourselves that way?
The short answer is that it isn’t acceptable. We are not perfect, and Disney has been drilling that into our heads since we were kids. Often we allow our guilt to control us and influence our opinions of ourselves. The mature thing to do is to admit you messed up. But it’s also good to cut yourself some slack. You can apologize, and you can do recon on the situation. But once you’ve done everything in your power to remedy the situation, what more can you do? What’s done is done, and you can regret it, but you can’t change it. So use the situation to grow, and use it to move yourself forward into becoming a better person than you were yesterday. There are some people who talk down to you and make you feel guilty for screwing up every now and then, but you will never need that in your life.
Mistakes are a huge part of being human — the fact that we are capable of messing things up once in awhile shows that we have many facets of ourselves. Learning from our actions is how we get wiser, and it is how we learn to solve our problems.
From an early age, many of us become our worst enemies, but the truth is that the person we should treat the best is ourselves. While it is important to be responsible and in control, it is also important to be forgiving toward ourselves and our peers. Similar to the way we learn to embrace our physical and emotional flaws, we need to learn to live and let go.
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