Taking a Look Back

Making mistakes is one of the easiest things in this world. It's what comes afterwards that worries me.

I'm not going to spread out the story of my life here, I don't even want to relive the past week and all the goodness it brought me (through my own doing, of course). I just want to focus for a moment on this feeling, the feeling after making quite a big mistake, and having hurt another (which is, from my point of view, the greatest mistake ever).

I have a couple of options here: first, retreat. Make a total stop, end all I had planned before, and do nothing. Leave things the way they were before, and use my mistake as an excuse to stop trying to do what I intended to in the first place - just because the first try failed so hideously.

Second: apologize. Apologize a lot. Drown in self deprecation until only my tiniest toes wiggle above the surface. I do intend to apologize, I must add. But not to that extent - because, in the beginning, I did have the honestest of intentions. I tried to do something good. It wasn't the idea that sucked, it was my approach.

Third: try to work it out. Try to find a mutual agreement and build something new and beautiful out of everything that went so wonderfully wrong. Here's the catch: it's incredibly hard. I have to not only find a way to apologize and make things better, but also dance down the narrowest line between having a great idea and simple, plain egoism. The problem's that I'm not totally wrong. And I'm not the only one who contributed to the creation of... the Mistake. I can't really recall a time before when I did something so terrible and wasn't the only one to blame. So I have to work out a situation that's completely new to me.

The problem is that it's so easy just to want to forget about it all. Just let go of all the ideas and all the reasons I tried to do it in the first place - the reasons that still stand. It's a lot harder to remember why I wanted it done, and how passionate I was about it all in the beginning.

So I just have to keep reminding myself. And I really, really have to work on my people skills. After all, as my s. o. said, I 'm lucky this kind of Mistake happened so early in my life. Had it happened later, it would have been a lot harder to fix.

Is that what it all comes down to? Learn from your mistakes?

I could only wish life was so simple. (But I guess the fun of having no idea what to do next would be gone, too, if you knew everything will work out itself eventually.)