The Truth About Mistakes
Monday, September 19, 2016
There are days when you just feel like a failure. Not in the sense that you never do anything right, but in the sense that you always do things right and no one sees them... and when you do one thing wrong, somehow, everybody points it out and remembers it.
There are also days when you feel bad for being the person in the other side of the story: the one who points out someone’s mistakes and fail at the attempt to applaud the better things they do.
I’m going to spare you the cliché (but true nonetheless) conclusion that we should learn from our mistakes and apply those lessons in the future. I’m going to spare you the old but gold belief that failures are our stairways to success and how defeat is essential to feel victory. What I want to give emphasis to, however, is how I’ve noticed that people have tendencies to open their eyes more on the bad things than the good ones when it comes to evaluating others.
I’ve always been the kind of person who, when really angry or hurt, never talks back, because I believe that we shouldn’t act upon our anger in that way. I’ve always been the kind of person who has trouble saying what he or she feels because it might offend someone. I never want to offend anyone, intentionally or not. The only way I deal with my anger and hurt is to calm down and let them pass. So, every time somebody points out the wrong things I do, which is rare compared to the right things, I choose to keep quiet and just listen to their altered judgment of who I am as a person, defined by the dot-sized mistake I made that masked the positive actions I’ve accomplished. And when all of these happened, I realized what I really wanted.
I didn’t want people to put me on a pedestal. I didn’t want people to disregard my mistakes in an attempt to make me feel better. I didn’t want people to reward me for every good gesture I do. I wanted people to accept me as me. Along with all my flair and my flaws, and the positive and the negative. I wanted people to accept the fact that the kind, overachieving, overly respectful, quiet me can coexist with the reckless, gullible, anxious me. I only wanted people to know that I can be a living contradiction. And I wanted them to learn to live with that. It’s okay that people blame me for not living up to their expectations… as long as they don’t overlook the efforts I’ve made in struggling to do otherwise. I only wanted people to accept that life is a combination of the good and the bad, in the same way people are. And what I want people to do for me, I want us all to do for each other.
So, the truth about mistakes is that, even when they’re inevitable, they are also subjective. Mistakes aren’t always a failed attempt at doing something. Most of the time, mistakes are the proof of the exertion of full effort. Mistakes are subjective because sometimes, what to you is a mistake, to others is an accomplishment. What to you is failure, to others is success. This is the exact reason why we shouldn’t allow others to let our mistakes define us, and why we shouldn’t define them through theirs. We should all try changing people’s perspective about making (and finding fault in) mistakes. Let me leave you with the first advice to do so:
Instead of criticizing people for what they’re not, appreciate them for what they are.
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