It’s Time To Own Your Mistakes

Sometimes you might not be there for people who need you. Sometimes you might say the wrong things at the wrong times. Sometimes you might hurt people unintentionally. Sometimes you might lose your temper. Sometimes you might say awful things that you might not be able to take back afterward. Sometimes you might do the wrong thing. Sometimes you might make awful mistakes in your life and sometimes you might even do them more than once. But all that doesn’t make you an awful human; it makes you basically just a human.

Sometimes we make mistakes that we feel ashamed of or ones that we can’t forgive ourselves for. Sometimes these mistakes make us believe that we are awful people. Sometimes we might try to hide the fact that they ever existed in the first place. We might deny them or shy away from them. And we might let them define us. We might let them build our opinion about what we think of ourselves. And we might keep beating ourselves up constantly over them.

But this should never be the way we feel about our mistakes. Because they don’t define us. They are part of us, but they are never what define us. It’s time to understand that you are not always the same person you used to be when you made your past mistakes. It’s time to realize that they helped you grow and learn from them. It’s time to understand that they are what shaped you into becoming who you are today. It’s time to acknowledge them and to face them. It’s time to not shy away from them or deny them. It’s time to start to own them and better yourself.

It’s time to forgive yourself for your past mistakes. It’s time to shift the way you look at your previous mistakes—instead of seeing them as these awful things that you regret, look at them as part of your story. They might not be a pretty part of it, but they are an essential part of it, that you can’t erase it or pretend that it’s not there.

I hope you accept the fact that every now and then you might mess things up. I hope you accept that you are not going to always meet the expectations you set for yourself or act the way you planned to in your mind. Things don’t always work according to your plan, and that’s okay. That’s part of life and that’s part of your journey that you need to make your peace with.