Mistakes are okay. They're not necessarily bad or harmful in most cases. In fact, mistakes tend to just simply be lessons that we learn from and move on. So why be afraid to make them?
As a barely-even-18-year-old, I like to think I know exactly what I want in life. I'm in the middle of a time in my life when I have to make some fairly big decisions along with almost everyone else my age. As if figuring out what I want to do for the rest of my life until I'm 65 or so years old isn't stressful enough, older people in my life put the pressure on. Hard. Parents, teachers, even strangers I meet at work add to the stress of college applications, SATs, ACTs, FAFSA, finances, careers, job fairs, etc. For awhile I was scared, absolutely terrified, of making a mistake because it could cost me happiness for the rest of my life. "Figure out a major you like!" "Why not apply for this school instead?" "What was your ACT score again?" Make it stop, please. My whole life, I've been told that mistakes ruin lives. Now in some extremely rare cases, some mistakes do cost a lot, but in my case of making a mistake like switching majors, nothing really makes a difference. Mistakes are nothing to be scared or ashamed of, they're actually great markers as a time when your life turned down a better path. Why do mistakes still seem so bad in our eyes then? Maybe because other people say that our mistakes are bad.
"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?" (Matthew 7:3) Why do people love to point out our issues, our choices, our mistakes? Are they scared of their own? Do they want to live through us? To tear us down? Other people are what take our mistakes to a much higher scale unnecessarily. I say unnecessarily because, at the end of the day, it's our life. We ourselves make the decisions on where to take our dreams, which way to live, how to do it, how to express ourselves, where to go in life, and everything in between. Someone may care so much for us and would hate to see us slip-up and make a mistake, but in my eyes, if someone really deeply cared, they'd watch us make that mistake but be there to help us recover. Letting others learn from mistakes is one of the best ways to teach, hands-down. Loving someone is letting them learn the world by trial-and-error. Caring for someone is letting them fall 99 times, and seeing them soar on the 100th try.
So let others make mistakes. Let them go into college blindly without a clue in the world. Don't freak out that a young, dumb teen got their first tattoo. Don't worry about the consequences of changing a major. Feel free to take the cover of shelter off of someone to let them see the real world. Let the world chew me up and spit me out, I'll be fine, I can handle it. When I make a mistake, it hurts to fail, I'll admit that, but the real pain lies in when I'm told by someone else I've failed or messed up.
