Isn't it just the worst feeling? That sinking in your gut you get when you realize you've made a mistake? Some people respond with anger. Some with denial. Some burst into tears. I'm more one of those, I think. It's a hard thing to have shoved in your face, particularly for people like me, who strive to be perfectionists. It's a futile goal, but still, we aim for it. No one wants to make mistakes, no one wants to admit we make them, and no one wants to face the deep, complicated mess of emotions they elicit in us all.
Mistakes, however, are simply a part of life. We learn and grow based not just on our successes but also on our failures. This is something I've been striving to teach my son even as I have to face it myself. One of the best ways to deal with the emotional upheaval that comes from making a mistake, I've learned, is to focus on what comes out of it. Some of our greatest inventions come from mistakes made in the pursuit of other things. Business Insider posted an article listing fifteen inventions that wouldn't exist if not for mistakes. Everything from the Slinky to penicillin, to chocolate chip cookies. Where would we be without chocolate chip cookies?!
Not a happy place, that's for sure.
The point, however, is that even when we make a mistake we can get something good out of it. We can learn what to do, what not to do, and how to never make that mistake again. The first step, however, is the hardest. It's the one most people fail at, which is why we end up angry, in denial, or going through a box of tissues.
Admitting we made the mistake in the first place.
Even if only to ourselves, we need to accept that we're flawed individuals. We're human. We mess up. Until we admit that, we can't take the next step, which is to learn from it and move on. Either that mistake becomes what breaks us or it become a whip we use to flail against the world around us. I will say it as many times as it needs saying: human beings are fallible. We make mistakes. We make errors. We are not perfect. We are not infallible. We are not omnipotent, omniscient, or otherwise all-knowing. We have to learn in order to grow. So, to show that everyone is capable of mistakes, I'm going to let you all in on a secret. I'm going back to school, to get my certificate in editing, so that I can be taken seriously as a professional editor.
I failed one of my assignments.
It hurt. It hurt to read all the zeroes, and to know I had so completely bombed that assignment. Thankfully, one of the people was nice enough to point out why I'd failed, and I was able to redo the assignment. The point, though, is that I had put a lot of work into the assignment originally, and to find out I'd messed up so badly was a blow. I could have written it off. I could have blamed the person who'd designed the assignment. I could have curled up in a ball and moaned about how I'd never "get it". And like the stages of grief, I did briefly imagine what it would be like to go down each of those paths. In the end, though, I sat myself down and redid the thing from scratch. Mistakes are what we make of them; we can learn from them and grow, or let them drag us down.
Either way, the choice of what to take from your mistakes is entirely up to you.