~ as someone who has spent way too long punishing herself for past mistakes

One of the hardest parts of my journey to loving my life again was forgiveness. This included forgiveness for people who I thought had wronged me, but also forgiveness for myself for anything I had gotten “wrong” during my life.

While there are so many examples of working towards forgiveness in my life, the most prominent one in my mind is the decision I made to leave teaching. I had grown up wanting to teach so badly. I had fought my parents about my college major, I had stayed in college an additional year to get my Master’s in education, I had won all these awards and acknowledgements for being a teacher that would make a difference in her students’ lives… and then, when I actually made it happen, I hated it. And that’s when the guilt set in.

Forgiveness never came easy to me. As someone with anxiety, I like to hold onto thoughts and feelings and ruminate in them until eventually my thoughts are left spiraling in my brain. It took me a lot of therapy and a lot more mistakes to figure out the four steps that could help me move past the anger, frustration, hurt, and other feelings that come with forgiveness. 

It took me a really long time to work through the following steps and forgive myself for not loving teaching. I was constantly stuck in the idea that I was letting myself down in some way because of all the years I had spent insisting this was my passion and my purpose in life. Now that we are three years out, let’s talk through the four steps I took to forgive my younger self.

Step #1: Validate your feelings.

I wish this was the easy part, but in a lot of ways, this is the hardest part. At the first stages of realizing that we made a mistake, for a lot of us, our first instinct is to make excuses or to distract ourselves with other areas of our life. In many ways, distraction is your worst enemy. When you are distracted from the real issue at hand, you are not living with and working past the feelings you’re feeling; instead, you are pushing off the inevitable breakdown. When we choose to feel and acknowledge the hard feelings, we are giving ourselves the self validation that we need to start the process of forgiving our mistakes. If you can’t even acknowledge the mistake you made, then how can you learn from it?

Let’s look at this in practice. My first year of teaching was hell for me. I realized pretty quickly that this was not the career for me, but it took me months and months to acknowledge I made a mistake. First came the excuses. “It will get better after year one, everyone says so.” “Once you move closer and your commute is shorter, it will get better.” “Maybe you just need to teach different classes.” “Maybe you need to stop working after hours.” “Maybe running a club you’re passionate about will help.” “You’re doing this for the kids.” And so on… It wasn’t supposed to be like this… so it had to get better… right? After the excuses came the distractions. First, I was diving headfirst into heading a community service organization’s executive board. When I wasn’t doing that, I was mindlessly doom scrolling or sleeping through my afternoons and weekends. 

Then came the breakdown moment: what if it doesn’t get better? Can I live like this forever? And the answer was to validate how I was feeling: No. I can’t live like this forever. I made a mistake, and it feels monumental and irreversible. This sucks. 

Feelings validated. Crying initiated. 

Tip: If you’re having trouble knowing what your feelings about a mistake you made are, try using a feelings wheel or a deck of feelings cards to pinpoint all the emotions. This has helped me so much in the past.

Step #2: Revenge is not the answer. Choose not to punish yourself.

Punishing yourself for making mistakes is never the answer. You might be so mad or angry or hurt at the thing that you did, but continuing to push those negative feelings onto yourself will not help you move toward forgiveness. Instead, choose to shower yourself with love for where you are at in this present moment. When we make mistakes, we allow ourselves to grow and that in itself is beautiful. 

The easy thing for me to do in my situation was mentally punish myself. I kept telling myself that I was wasting my potential and that I should be better than this and that I wasted time and money to do this and the ultimate revenge was thinking I had failed. The grief I experienced in these moments was the death of the image that I had built of myself as a teacher. It took a long time for me to acknowledge that we are not just the work that we do. I worked really hard to build up my self love the second year that I was teaching. I prioritized my well-being and I started to search for what I was truly passionate about instead of seeking out ways to punish myself.

Tip: Do you know those girls who always think they deserve a little treat? Become that girl.

Step #3: Acknowledge what happened and discover the lesson. Embody the mantra, “I cannot change the past, but I can do better in the future.”

So you made a mistake. You’ve admitted it to yourself and you’ve validated how it made you feel. From here, you need to acknowledge that you cannot change the past. You can, however, change how you respond to a past mistake and how you proceed from that moment. You cannot change what has already happened and that is okay because you can plan how you would handle things differently if this situation arose again and you can also make a plan for moving forward from this. What’s next for you?

For me, this looked like finding new career options, but this could be on a smaller scale as well. Maybe you made a budgeting mistake at work and you need to set a reminder to double check your numbers. Maybe you said something hurtful to a friend and you want to practice stopping to  breathe before you speak. If it is a bigger scale, then for me, I had to recognize that I could not change the facts. I could not get back the five years of schooling that led me to being a teacher. I could not leave my job until I found a new one for financial reasons. I could not change the fact that I made a mistake when I was 18 years old and now 23-year-old me was going to have to fix it. This was hard for me. I was experiencing the grief of losing the person that I thought I was while simultaneously discovering the person I was going to become next.

Tip: Mantra is such a powerful tool to mold your mindset. You can literally repeat a mantra or affirmation to yourself in the morning, before bed, or in moments of weakness. This will help remind your brain that mistakes happen and we are learning from them.

Step #4: And finally, you have to let the mistake exist as a part of your past.

You’ve analyzed the mistake, you’ve overthought it, maybe you’ve cried about it or screamed about how unfair your life is, and now it’s time to take a breath and let that mistake exist as part of your past not your present. You are valid no matter how you feel about the mistake. You have chosen to not punish yourself for something you cannot change. You have discovered the lesson and thought about steps to move forward. By letting go of the idea that this mistake has to be at the forefront of your mind, allows the mistake to exist as a moment of the past and opens room for you to forgive yourself.

Truly forgiving myself for the mistakes I made in trying to become something that wasn’t for me took about two years. I’m so grateful that I got to this point of being able to let that mistake exist… so much so that I can write about it here and not feel any of my past anxiety, pain, or guilt. I do forgive myself for these mistakes, and my life is better for it.

Tip: You can let go of your mistakes mentally in your head or find a physical manifestation of this. Some people may enjoy journaling about the mistake. Maybe you want to write it on a piece of paper and (safely) burn it or flush it down the toilet or rip it up into a million pieces.

Forgiveness is not easy especially for my perfectionists and my people pleasers who just don’t believe in making mistakes. There are still days when these steps don’t work for me or one step takes longer to settle than the last time or I don’t want to move on from the feelings I have about it… the best part about this guide is that I know it can work. It’s just about allowing it to work and trusting that it will get better.

Much love,

Alyssa

Forgiveness is hard. Leave your tips in the comments below <3