I’ve heard it all too many times before. “If only I hadn’t..” or “I’d be a different person if this didn’t happen..” The truth is, you are who you are for a reason. You’ve made your decisions, you’ve faced the consequences. Why let the bad negatively influence who you are now?

The thing is, we rarely think about how we’d be such a different person if x good thing and y lucky event hadn’t occurred, but rather talk about how making a giant mistake has caused us total heartbreak in life. Stop. You are a human being. You make mistakes and you make amazingly good decisions. Why only focus on the negative, when you are so much than that? I know it’s difficult to not see past the mistakes in your life. We sometimes can’t help but to think that our lives are defined by the shortsighted things that we’ve done.

Thankfully, there is forgiveness in our mistakes. You have to grow from them and accept yourself for all of your flaws. You have to let yourself heal so that you can learn from them. And like our parents always told us, isn’t learning from our mistakes one of the greatest lessons we have?

You are so much more than a bad decision. You are a person—you have blood in your veins, a brain in your head, and the ability to experience so much more in life than the negative. You have 20/20 hindsight vision, and the capability to know what it takes to help yourself in the future. Your past failures are ammo for a better future. Just learn to forgive yourself first. I promise that once you let your shortcomings go, you can go further than you’ve ever thought possible.

You can’t let the past define your future. Sometimes, it’s easy to be caught up in the snares that life brings us, and it’s even easier to stay within them and continue to despair. But the truth is that you have a choice to not let these tangles entrench you. You have to let go of the past and the things that are hurting you. You have to keep walking regardless of the mistakes you’ve made.

You need to know that every day is the chance to be someone new. You have to option to not let the past define you; you have the grace to start over. Remember that.

Remember how many things you’ve done right. You have come so far, and for that, I’m proud of you. Even when it was difficult, even when you didn’t want to, you kept going. That, in itself, is amazing. You should be proud of your mistakes. You should be proud to overcome them and use them as knowledge to fuel yourself into making better choices. It doesn’t matter who you were, it doesn’t matter where you were, it matters who you are and who you choose to be.

Choose forgiveness. Choose to not let your past mistakes become your defining moment. You are the person you are because, as Robert Frost said, you “have miles to go before [you] sleep.”