I'm a college student. I f*ck up. A lot. I pay for things in quarters, I almost get hit by a car daily just trying to cross the street, I eat foods that are knowingly the most unhealthy sludge I could possibly digest, I stay up extremely late almost solely to complain about how tired I am and last but not least, I'm just overall very irritating as a person. Suffice to say, if there is one golden nugget of information I have learned from my chaotic yet woefully uneventful 18 years on this planet, it is that I, Sarah Marie Lucchesi, make mistakes. Some as simple as ordering a small fry when I knew it was a medium kind of day, to staying with a guy who didn't deserve me. All the lessons and blessings in life that have stemmed from this understanding of my flaws, have led me thus far. To make beautifully vague and cliche assertions and then follow up with rampantly confusing explanations as to why I, typical annoying teen girl, should be heard. So here's some life advise that even I am surprised you're still willing to read.
"When though maketh a mistake, though must trieth again and again until thine succeeds," -some important self-righteous old dude who gave motivational speakers and dads trying to teach their kids to ride bikes everywhere, a sound and concise point. Yes, when we, as an inevitable species of walking-talking failures, mess up, we should try again. With the reminder of the burn of failure coupled with the knowledge from our experience, we should indeed try again. But it's not that simple. We are too young to be passing up on little moments to learn, and too old to look past free and blatant genius when it stares us in the face. Before we take the step to repeat our same actions and expect slightly different results, we have to be ruthless in robbing the painful moment in time for all that it's worth. Have you ever spilled something while trying to do too much at one time? Sometimes the take away from that is not to offer to grab the whole office's coffee on the day the elevator is broken and you're on the 5th floor. Other times with the same situation you could take away that some days, as bad as you want to take care of everyone else, it's really yourself that you need to be focused on. There are an infinite amount of mistakes that can screw up your days, but an equally abundant amount of lessons that can float to the surface because of them.
Every good memory in life gets all the credit. Pictures and stories and things to look back on and remember fondly. But why don't we memorialize our mistakes? Hell, they're the only thing that's ever truly taught us something. Plus, a bad memory either gives you a hilarious story ("the time I spilled 20 coffees down five flights of stairs and smelled of espresso and defeat for the rest of the day") or a damn good lesson ("It's perfectly okay to be selfish sometimes.)
Life is boring if you let it be boring. Life is also magnificently insane. There is always something more you could be doing or immersing yourself in or falling in love with. But unfortunately, we, as failures, are in some way trapped in our own ways of life. Bound by a job, person, or place, even if we love it, we are still bound. So all we can do is think about all that fracking craziness I described earlier. Or that's what we allow ourselves to think. In reality, we are born with our best asset to having a stellar and endlessly exquisite lifestyle: our brains. They're capable of twisting and turning any stimuli we pump them with into something entertaining or useful. But we have to train them. We have to tell them to keep surprising us, to see the same thing everyday and still find a way to make it amuse us. We have got to take our days with a twist and a straw and suck them dry for all the laughable, learnable, yet resilient persistence of consistency that they have. See it this way, and you'll never make the same mistake twice.
