I’ve been very conscious of my mistakes lately. Not just the error of an oopsies, but the lesson that comes with it. Whether I spoke out of turn to someone I care about because I thought being strong meant being aggressive, or I messed something up because I just didn’t know. My mistakes have been in my face lately. I think it’s because I’ve been getting a lot of stuff right too. Things have been going so beautifully, my mistakes feel like the mustard on my white shirt- I was so close to being perfect. But was I? I think, when we make mistakes and learn from them, it actually brings us closer to perfection.

2 Corinthians 12: 9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. 10 That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

People who care about me have told me before, “don’t be so hard on yourself.” For a long time, I felt like that was easier said than done. Today, I feel I’ve come a long way in my ability to be conscious of my mistakes and still synthesize them in order to be a more experienced, more knowledgeable person. 

Case in point: I’m learning Premier Pro right now, and I recently spent two weeks editing an hour-long interview I recorded for YouTube. On a tired day, I somehow managed to delete the source file from my desktop, and then deleted it from the trash. So I couldn’t recover the video when Premier notified me my source file was missing. My heart dropped as I realized I’d have to re-edit the whole thing. I mentally kicked myself for 5 minutes, and then I put on my big girl pants, grabbed some food, and started re-editing. I just finished it today, and I’m proud of myself for sticking it out. The lesson here is simple: sometimes we f*** up. When we do, we don’t dwell on the error forever, we try to fix it. Apologize to the person you yelled at, clean up the sprite you spilled, start a new video edit. Mistakes can be forgiven. As long as we, in the famous words of Aaliyah, try again.