Oh, How Many Mistakes I Have Made and Wrong Decisions I Have Taken.
There were decisions I was completely convinced were right. They weren’t. There were people I trusted more than I should have, and others I didn’t trust enough. There were moments when I stayed too long where I should have left, and others when I left too soon.
I wasted time on things I wouldn’t even look at today. I defended decisions that didn’t deserve to be defended simply because they were mine. I stayed silent when I should have spoken up, and spoke up when it would have been wiser to stay silent.
I tried to preserve relationships that had long since ceased to exist. Sometimes I lost good people because I was convinced they would always be there. I made mistakes at work, in judging people, in relationships, but perhaps most of all in judging myself.
Some mistakes cost me money. Some cost me time. Some cost me years that no one can ever give me back. Some cost me peace of mind. And some cost me much more than I’d care to admit today.
And no, I’m not grateful for every mistake.
That’s one of those phrases that only sounds good once enough time has passed. There are decisions I still wish I had never made. There are some words I wish I’d never spoken. There are some people I wish I’d understood better while they were still by my side.
But I did what I did.
And at some point, a person has to stop negotiating with their own past.
You can’t go back and become a wiser person at a time when you didn’t yet have the experience you have today. You can’t erase the consequences just because you understand them now. You can only look at them without making excuses and admit to yourself where you went wrong.
Not to look for someone to blame for every decision you have made.
To apologize where there is still someone to apologize to.
To fix what can still be fixed.
And to learn not to repeat the same mistake under a different name.
Today, I have much less faith in a person who claims to rarely make mistakes. I have much more faith in someone who is capable of looking back and admitting that they made a mistake somewhere, that they hurt someone, that they overestimated themselves, or that they failed to see what is now perfectly clear to them.
Years bring experience.
But maturity begins only when we stop rewriting our own past so that we always come out looking right.
I’ve made many mistakes.
I’ll probably make more.
But today I’m trying to pay the price for each one just once.
Not over and over again, for the rest of my life.
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