Sometimes we can get away with the mistakes we made. They stay in our heads, turning around for days, months or even years. But they are ours and ours alone. Sometimes we admit to our mistakes. We try to make it right. We can’t stand the thought of carrying that weight around so we suck it up and admit to our mistakes. We are only human. We do things that hurt other people, whether we did it intentionally or not. We try to minimize that pain, and sometimes by minimizing the pain to ourselves, we hurt others even more.
We say something we shouldn’t to someone we shouldn’t. We do things we wish we could take back. We stay awake at night, wondering how to make things right, wondering if we should tell the truth, wondering why it happened, wondering if it’s going to happen again. We get tricked into thinking that the right thing … is sometimes the biggest mistake.
Mistakes lead to guilt. Or fear. Or the absence of guilt or fear, and the wondering of why. But if nothing else, each mistake we have made along the way have led us to who we are today. Each wrong turn, each bad decision, each choice we’ve made has served to make each one of us the person we are right now, in this very moment.
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I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. I’m not perfect and I’ll be the first to tell you. I’ve done things I regret and I’ve hurt people I never thought I could hurt. I’ve lost friends over stupid battles and I’ve lost family over things I couldn’t control.
I grew up in a white family in a white neighborhood. People who meet me naturally assume my parents and brothers are asian and I hate that. People automatically assume I’m chinese just because I’m an asian decent. I hate that even more. Don’t judge a book by it’s cover.
I’m stubborn and selfish at times because I was a brat as a child. I went through a phase of thinking the world revolved around me. But then I grew up and realized that there’s so much more to this world … and often times it’s better to give than receive. You can’t always get what you want.
I’m very critical and hard on myself. I hate defeat. I hate losing. I hate being viewed as a failure. Growing up, I felt like my parents viewed me as “the child that wasn’t good enough.” I felt like I couldn’t compete with my brothers. Ever. They always had my parents eye and I was also in the distance, just trying to keep up. I craved my parents attention and felt like I never got enough of it … even though I got more than I deserved.
I’m so scared of getting older because I’m scared it will lead to making more mistakes and bad decisions. I go through moments when I hate change. This is one of them. Everything changes as you get older.
Right before my mother passed away, we got into a huge fight. The days she spent in the hospital were the days I spent wanting to take back every hateful word I had ever said to her. I spent every day blaming myself for her death because I never got the chance to say “I’m sorry” or “I love you.” To this day, it’s been my biggest regret. I took the love and appreciation of my mother for granted and it was the biggest mistake I could have ever made.
I’m a perfectionist, although you would probably never know it. I crave perfection. It all started my senior year of high school when I took a ceramics class. It was probably the worst idea ever because everything I made needed to be absolutely perfect. With every glazed bowl I made my perfection grew more intensely.
I’m not your average girl and I don’t live an average 20-something life. I’m just trying to survive in this crazy, mixed-up world. And if I make mistakes, well then so be it.
Maybe mistakes are what make our fate … without them what would shape our lives?
