Mistakes of the Mind

A lot of people overtime have talked about whether or not mistakes they make linger in their minds for long. Which is crazy, because for me personally, mistakes, both big and small, stay around in my head for way longer than they probably should. And I don’t have a good answer as to why.

I guess one of the potential reasons as to why is maybe I’ve been so conditioned in my life too actively avoid mistakes for one reason or another, than anytime they do happen, it’s a big deal because I try to not let them happen period. Which is such an unhealthy way of thinking about the mistakes you’re going to make in your lifetime. They are lessons; opportunities for you to reflect on the things you did and figure out what went wrong in the process. They also give us opportunities to grow as an individual and gain insight on a problem or field that we may not interact with every day of our lives. But, from personal experience, I think the largest contributing factor for avoiding mistakes is the immediate potential blowback from a person or person’s. It’s one thing to make a mistake when we are by ourselves; we can have it happen and hopefully rectify before anyone else catches on. But you aren’t always going to be that lucky. So, if someone is around when you mess up, you have to do your best to take it on the chin and move on. Hopefully, the person who is with you when you screw up, won’t give you such a hard time about it (depending on the context and how big the mistake is relative to that; every situation is different and responses should be adjusted as such). From my own experience, people always had a really harsh reaction to a mistake I made. It was always quick and dirty before you awkwardly try to go back to whatever you were doing before it happened. It always involved some yelling and maybe name calling, which is also why I’m SO hard on myself when I screw up. I always try to reflect on how I can avoid it, but the fact of the matter is that, I always beat myself up too much when I screw up and I wish I didn’t. I try but it always comes down to that.

For example, I recently left my keys in my car (the car wasn’t on with gas, but on to the point where you could use the AC or listen to music), and drained my car battery completely down to zero. I called someone to try and jump it, but no luck. The rest of that night when I got home after leaving my car at work, all I did was internally beat myself up over it; saying how dumb I was for letting it happen in the first place. I know better than to do something like that. But in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t that big of a deal. I called a truck the next morning, they got it to start and I drove it back home. In the end, I got lucky, but I lost sleep that night because I was so worried about how other people would perceive my mistake. So, I beat myself up even more because of that. I told some people I know after everything was said and done, and they told me I should’ve just calmed down and not freaked out like I did.

In the end, we are held back by our own minds. How they play games with us, and how we can perceive situations much worse than they actually are. Anxiety, stress and all those other emotions can really play a large role as to why we get so worked up over mistakes. But overtime, as we gold older and have more experience, at least for me, I think I’ll be able to rationalize these problems better and not get so worked up over them. Until then, I’m trapped in my own head; with my mistakes of the mind.