What To Do After You Screw Up

 I assume you're on the younger side, because if you were older, by sheer virtue of the fact you've lived longer, you'd know the answer. But I'll spoil you anyway!


The answer is you don't have a choice. You're going to wake up tomorrow and what happened will still have happened. Now's about the time you'll find out that life is really more a series of deaths and rebirths, bookended by major life events. These pocket lifetimes are way more structured and deliberate early on in life; changing schools, hitting puberty, losing a grandparent, getting fired from a longtime job...but become far more random and potentially brutal as time goes on. You'll find that traumatic changes to your routine, even benign ones, and especially the ones you don't initiate yourself, result in the eventual feeling that the time period in question was "a lifetime ago."


So, congratulations. You died. The painful memories you are actively trying to suppress right now will someday come back to you, and you will regard them as artifacts from another life entirely. At that moment you'll know that at some point since then you were born again, slowly, into your modern identity and persona. And just when you feel like it's always been this way, life will change again....and again! You're gonna die a lot.


I mean you can call me full of shit for claiming that sheer time and experience can give you this wisdom as a convenient excuse to pull rank on you, but it's one of those things you'll have to trust me on. Live long enough, and I promise you'll agree!





Here's the cold, honest truth.

You just do.

Dwelling on it makes it substantially worse- it's like punishing yourself over and over for something you already felt the consequences for. It's pointless. You can give yourself a small moment of time to grieve your mistake, but you need to pick up and move on. Whether you grieve a little or a lot, you still have to eventually move on and/or correct the mistake if it is that sort.

I made a mistake in my early 20's that cost me around $35k. When I realized what I had done, I felt sick to my stomach for days and weeks. I got stuck in a mental loop of that mistake for several years, even dreaming about it. Now, I look back and think "yeah, that sucked, I survived it."

I made an even larger mistake in my late 20's. While it didn't hurt me financially, it nearly wiped me out health-wise. Mentally and physically, I was one bad day away from having an aneurysm or steering into opposing traffic. That bad. When I realized I needed to make a change and that 4 years of my life had been chasing the wrong goal for the right reasons and best of intentions, it threw me into a whirlwind of cognitive dissonance. "I was wrong??" was the soundtrack for a solid 2-3 years. I knew it, but I couldn't accept it. Oh, it wasn't a case of "I'm always right," but more of a "I took the honorable path, and it was wrong. Everything I was always taught was... wrong?" I had to pick up and move on, as painful as it was.

The sooner you move on, the sooner the pain stops. Here's an analogy. Let's say someone tells you that they are going to punch you in the face 10 times, and you cannot avoid it. Would you rather take all 10 and get over it, or space it out over several hours, days, weeks, dreading it?




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